


one night to push and scream (and then relief)

by tacosandflowers



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternative Universe - FBI, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Smut, Undercover as Married
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-07 20:52:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5470430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tacosandflowers/pseuds/tacosandflowers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bellamy Blake and Clarke Griffin are FBI agents sent undercover as a married couple to infiltrate the Wallace family organized crime ring. Great plan, except for the part where they hate each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	one night to push and scream (and then relief)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [feminist14er](https://archiveofourown.org/users/feminist14er/gifts).



> For the wonderful feminist14er, who likes enemies to friends to lovers and undercover married/dating. It was such a joy writing this for you! I know nothing about how the FBI works other than some X-Files exposure in the 90s and early seasons of Bones (meaning basically nothing). I have taken so many liberties when it comes to the FBI, and crime and espionage in general, because honestly I just wanted to get these two laid. Forgive me? Also, apologies to Breaking Bad. Thanks to wordyanansi for plot help and crystalkei for early smut reviews. This is smutty, you've been warned. Title from Jose Gonzalez / The Knife.

"You have got to be kidding me," Bellamy Blake yells into his phone. He's standing on the balcony of the condo he currently occupies for undercover purposes, looking over the Mount Weather, California city skyline and he is _pissed_. Bellamy works for the FBI, and has been posing as a hedge fund manager named Benjamin Becker to gather information on the Wallace family, who run an organized crime ring. He thought things were going well, until the higher-ups called.

 

"Calm down, Blake," Marcus Kane, his boss, says on the other end of the line. "We've thought long and hard about this, and decided it's the best course of action to keep the case moving forward."

 

"You think having me pretend to be married to _Clarke Griffin_ is the best course of action? Sir, you've been in a room with the two of us plenty of times. You cannot possibly think this is a good idea."

 

"What I think is that you've been working your way in with the Wallace family for over three months. They're starting to open up to you, but you told me yourself they're still keeping you at arms length. A wife makes you more trustworthy."

 

"And that wife has to be Griffin?" Bellamy protests. “Are you forgetting about what happened in Miami?”

 

He and Clarke have had a rivalry since her first day in the DC office, and what started out as relatively minor antagonism was significantly worsened by a botched undercover operation they were both on four years ago in Miami. Their cover had been blown, the criminals they were pursuing fled the country, and they each blamed the other for it at the time. It did not bode well for future undercover work together, in Bellamy’s opinion.

 

"Special Agent Griffin is one of the best operatives working on this case,” Kane says. “I need her to infiltrate the female side of the family. We know from the information you've been gathering that there's a strong possibility some of the more illicit parts of the Wallace family business are being run by the women. As for Miami, we all know that operation was compromised by circumstances out of everyone’s control. The sooner you and Clarke accept that, the better, because we need her to soften your edges."

 

Bellamy scoffs at the idea of a hardass like Clarke softening anything, but he's afraid Kane has a point about the other thing. A female undercover agent would have access to parts of the Wallace family crime dynasty that he never could.

 

"Have you told her yet?" he asks.

 

"I have," Kane says. "She's as enthusiastic about the assignment as you are, but she's prepared to follow orders and get started as soon as possible."

 

"Of course she is," Bellamy says resignedly. Clarke is such an overachiever, always having to be the best. "And when will my lovely ‘wife’ be arriving?"

 

"You’re flying to Vegas tomorrow to meet her,” Kane replies.

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“This marriage needs a backstory. You’ve been dating long-distance—that explains why she hasn’t been around before now—and you’ll meet up in Vegas for the weekend and tie the knot. That explains the lack of wedding planning,” Kane says.

 

“And we actually have to go to Vegas?” Bellamy asks in disbelief.

 

“You need to make the trip in case the Wallace family has eyes on you. The story has to check out. We’ll have a marriage certificate drawn up with your aliases on it. You and Agent Griffin can spend the weekend going over the details of the case and getting your stories in line. I’ll remind you that this is—”

 

“An order, I know. Got it, sir.”

 

He does a lot of grumbling to himself that night about duty and “the good of the investigation,” and by the time he wakes up the next day, he’s almost not angry anymore.

 

The flight from Mount Weather to Vegas is short, and he’s supposed to meet Clarke at Caesar’s Palace, where the FBI has booked them a room. She’s already there—because of course she’s early to her undercover Vegas marriage assignment—and she yanks the door open before he can stick his key card in the lock.

 

“Well, if it isn’t my fiancé,” she says with a smirk. Her blonde hair is pulled back in her standard braid and she’s wearing a black t-shirt and black jeans.

 

“Standing inside the door waiting,” he drawls. “That excited to see me?”

 

“I’m an FBI agent, it’s my job to hear idiots like you coming,” she replies, rolling her eyes. “Get in here.”

 

“Bossy as ever,” he mumbles under his breath as he follows her inside.

 

“Heard that too,” she says. She leads him into the room, which he’s relieved to see has two beds. She’s clearly already gotten to work, with her laptop set up on one of the beds surrounded by paperwork.

 

“So this is our honeymoon suite?” Bellamy asks as he tosses his bag on the other bed. “You’d think this place would have a bit more of a nod to Roman history, but I guess that’s not what the clientele comes for.”

 

She gives him a level gaze. “Only you would complain about something like that. Let’s be clear, Blake,” Clarke says. “We both think this undercover marriage assignment is a terrible idea.”

 

“Oh really? I would have thought you’d at least be pretending to think it’s ingenious, for ass-kissing purposes.”

 

“Fuck off, Bellamy. I don’t like you, you don’t like me, neither of us likes this arrangement,” she declares. “But we have to do it. Kane is right about you needing female support to get evidence on all of the Wallace family business interests.”

 

He hates that she isn’t wrong, so he doesn’t agree with her out loud. “You sure you’re ready for this?” he asks.

 

“Of course I’m ready,” she snaps in response. “I’ve been working on the case from headquarters since before you went undercover. The hardest part is going to be tolerating you to the point where other people will believe we’re married. Please tell me your alias comes with a brand new personality so my job will be easier.”

 

“I thought being away from you for three months would make you easier to deal with, but apparently I was wrong,” he snaps back.

 

She sighs. “Look. We can waste our energy fighting, but I have shit to get done before we leave tomorrow.” She points to a pile of folders on the nightstand next to his bed. “Kane sent a bunch of files with me that he wants you to look through before we go back to Mount Weather. You should get started. I have to go shopping.”

 

“Shopping? Seriously?” he asks.

 

“If I’m going to be the wife of a loose-moraled hedge fund jerkwad then I have to dress the part,” she says as she grabs her purse. “I didn’t have time to buy anything before I left DC and apparently Vegas is a great place to shop for rich-guy’s-wife clothes.”

 

“What’s your rich-guy’s-wife name?”

 

She walks over to her bed, picks up a piece of paper, and hands it to him. “Catherine Becker, neé Lundquist. Meet me at this address at six o’ clock, it’s the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel.”

 

“What the hell? We are not actually getting married,” he says, panic welling inside him.

 

“Chill out, Romeo, we just have to get some photos of ourselves at the chapel so we have something to show anyone who might ask back in Mount Weather. I already have the fake marriage certificate in my briefcase. Just show up and wear something Benjamin would wear to his Vegas wedding.” 

 

“Fine,” he grumbles as she leaves, settling down on the bed with the pile of folders from Kane.

 

Bellamy likes undercover work, and he likes his job in general. It’s just dealing with things like this that grates on him. He wishes, not for the first time, that he could be in the field with his actual partner, Nathan Miller, but Miller is really shy and prefers to work behind the scenes while Bellamy sweet-talks people. Even Clarke’s partner, Raven Reyes, would have been better, although he’s not sure Reyes could handle being around the Wallaces for long without injuring someone.

 

So Clarke it is. He prays as he digs into the paperwork that things go as smoothly as they can, but based on their first interaction, he’s not quite sure what he’s in for.

 

**

 

Clarke arrives at the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel at ten til six—she's compulsively early, so sue her—and makes a beeline for a spot where she can put her bags down. So many bags, so many clothes, and shoes, and makeup, and other things to make her look like Catherine Becker.

 

This assignment is the bane of her existence. Or rather, Bellamy Blake is the bane of her existence, she thinks as she shakes her arms to get back some of the circulation she lost while wrangling bags. Other than the nightmare operation in Miami four years ago, she doesn't mind undercover work—it can be fun to take on anther identity—but pretending to be married to Blake? It's like Kane concocted an assignment especially designed to torture her.

 

It does make sense, though, unfortunately. They're getting close to having enough evidence to bring Dante Wallace and his son Cage in on money laundering and fraud charges, but there’s still a ways to go. They know some of the lower rungs of the Wallace family crime ladder are directly involved in drug trafficking, hence the money being laundered, but they can’t quite make the connection between the two. Bellamy has been working diligently for months under the guise of launching a new hedge fund and wooing the Wallaces into investing their money with him, which has given him access to detailed financial records. 

 

The problem is, he's only getting access to the records managed by Cage, all of which have been carefully polished by well-compensated accountants to hide any shady dealings. The real meat of the Wallace family's guilt, they suspect, lies within the business area managed by Cage's wife, Lorelei Tsing Wallace. After marrying into the family, she became close with Dante's wife, Patricia, and the two of them started a line of skin care products called ClearWeather. Clarke's assignment is to befriend the women and try to uncover any illegal activity behind the scenes of their domain.

 

Fitting in with these women is going to be... interesting. They're wealthy, and from her preliminary research and the intel Bellamy has been collecting, they have expensive taste in everything. Clarke grew up rich, but she's always felt uncomfortable spending a lot of money on things, and her lifestyle has been simple since she left home at age eighteen. So it's going to be weird, going back to dressing in expensive clothes and pretending to care about material wealth, a revisiting of her tumultuous childhood so to speak. Even though the Bureau is paying for everything, spending the amount of money she had today made her extremely uncomfortable.

 

 _You'll just have to get over that_ , she thinks as she adjusts the ivory sheath dress she'd purchased to wear for these ridiculous wedding photos. She figured the sheath screamed "money!" and "taste!" but was still understated enough to pass for a dress someone would wear to her impromptu Vegas wedding. She'd paired it with a pair of pumps she can repurpose with other outfits and ducked into a mall bathroom to do her makeup with her newly-purchased Sephora products. After fluffing out her hair, she was all set for her debut as Catherine. It wasn't her typical style—her mother would love the look, for example—but that was the point. 

 

Bellamy shows up at six sharp and looks around, not noticing her at first. He's wearing a suit, expensive and impeccably cut as fitting his moneyed alias, and Clarke has to stop herself from staring because he looks _good_. This is a completely different look from the typical suits he wears when he's at headquarters back in DC, which are definitely the suits of a cheap guy on a government salary. 

 

She knows Bellamy has a major chip on his shoulder when it comes to money and that he hates spending it (and the people who have it and spend it). The price tag on the suit he's currently wearing must have galled him terribly, and as much as she herself is uncomfortable spending a lot, she derives a sick pleasure as she imagines his face while paying for it. 

 

She gets a jolt when he finally does notice her and does a double-take, his eyes widening as he takes in her new look as Catherine. He clears his throat as he makes his way over to her.

 

"You look different," he says.

 

"No shit, Sherlock, we're undercover," she says in a low voice. She reaches into her purse—a new Coach bag that cost more than her monthly rent—and then grabs his left hand, shoving a gold band into his palm. She doesn't think about the size of that hand, or the slightly roughened texture of his skin. "Here, put this on."

 

"Not gonna get down on one knee first?" he quips as he slides the ring on.

 

"No, but you can if you want to pretend to give me this thing," she says, and flashes the massive diamond solitaire she'd bought an hour ago. 

 

"Jesus Christ, I do not want to know how much that piece of what I'm guessing is not conflict-free pressurized carbon cost," he says.

 

"You really don't," she replies. "For your health. Don't worry, we'll return it after the job and the taxpayers' money will go back to paying for useful things like George W. Bush’s pension."

 

"Are you that much of a wonk that you want to discuss government spending in a Vegas wedding chapel?" Bellamy asks as he twists the ring on his finger uncomfortably.

 

Clarke doesn't get a chance to respond before they're approached by a chapel employee who looks remarkable like Tammy Faye Bakker. 

 

"Hi! Welcome to the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel! Are you here to get hitched?" the woman asks in a loud voice.

 

"Actually, we've already gotten married," Clarke says in a smooth, liquid voice, taking a moment to flash her left hand.

 

"My goodness, you certainly have," the woman says as she grabs her hand to get a closer look at the ring, which Clarke has paired with a diamond-studded gold wedding band. 

 

"We were so excited about it we forgot to get our photos taken," Clarke continues with a pout. "We were wondering if we could use your photography services? I read on your website that you offer photo packages."

 

"We most certainly do," the woman says, and Clarke swears she can see dollar signs in the woman's eyes as she proceeds to list the various options. Clarke chooses a package and the woman leads them into the chapel itself, which has a designated area for photos.

 

"Now stand right there, Mr. and Mrs..." the photographer begins.

 

"Becker," Clarke says brightly. "Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Becker." She actually giggles after saying this, playing it off as the affectation of a ditzy blonde excited about her recent nuptials, but it honestly stems from her own horror at the entire situation. Bellamy looks at her like she's grown a second head and she grabs his bicep and gives him a big smile. "Come on, honey, let's look good for the camera."

 

The photographer directs them through a series of poses that force Clarke and Bellamy to get cozy in ways they never in a million years would have expected to have to be with each other. _It’s for the case_ , Clarke repeats inside her head as she places her hand on his chest and gives another beauty pageant smile and then transitions into standing back against him while he puts his arm around her waist. They manage to not physically recoil from each other, but it's still supremely awkward, given that the most touching they’ve done before today was an ill-fated arm-wrestling match two years prior that ended with Clarke screaming about the patriarchy and breaking a desk lamp.

 

“Why don’t we get one last shot of you two kissing?” the photographer says.

 

“Like, on the cheek?” Bellamy asks, his voice slightly uneven.

 

“Come on, she’s your wife! Give her a nice smack on the lips. Your mother-in-law will love it, I promise,” the photographer encourages.

“Ha! You don’t know my mother-in-law,” Bellamy replies.

 

“What’s wrong, Bl—Benjamin? Too much of a pussy to kiss your wife in public?” Clarke challenges, even though she’s panicking inside.

 

“Language, Catherine,” Bellamy chastises. And then he leans down and kisses her.

 

She knew this moment would come eventually, when they would have to kiss as part of this undercover deal. She just didn’t think it would come quite this _early._ His lips on hers are surprisingly soft, and he’s clean-shaven, and at first all she can think about is how with kissing, nobody really talks about the other parts of the face that have to fit together besides the lips. Bellamy’s face is suddenly so close to hers. There’s an unexpected quiver in her stomach, and she allows her mouth to soften slightly as the flash goes off. Before she knows it, they’re pulling apart and the photographer is telling them it’s a wrap. Bellamy stares at her for a moment before blinking and turning away, face unreadable.

 

“I’ll get you the digital shots at the register and mail any prints you order to your home address,” the photographer says.

 

“Well, you didn’t turn into a frog, unfortunately,” Clarke says as they make their way to the front.

 

“I think you’re getting the fairy tale wrong, Princess,” Bellamy replies.

 

“Seriously? That nickname again?” she asks in disgust.

 

“Have you seen yourself in the mirror recently? Besides, it seems like something Benjamin would call Catherine.”

 

“Ugh, you’ve been thinking about stuff like that?”

 

“You haven’t? We have to be on top of our game to pull this off, and little details like that are what’ll make or break our cover. These people will be watching our every move like hawks,” he explains.

 

“I know that,” she says. “It just seems like a convenient excuse for you to dredge up a nickname you know I hate.”

 

“If the shoe fits,” he replies with a shrug.

 

He winces as she moves one of her sharp-heeled feet at his toes with a glare that says _don’t push your luck_ , and then they’re interrupted by the photographer clearing his throat at the cash register.

“Will you be paying with a credit card?” he asks.

 

Bellamy reaches for his wallet. “Don’t worry, I’ll get this,” he says. “I better get used to paying for everything now that I have a wife who loves to spend money.”

 

The cashier gives him a knowing look, and Bellamy shares a smirk with the man until Clarke shoves a pile of shopping bags at him, effectively wiping the grin from his face.

 

“You don’t mind carrying these, do you honey?” she asks sweetly, fuming inside.

 

This is going to be an interesting assignment.

 

** 

 

"These aren't half bad," Clarke says as she skims through the pictures on her phone—the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel has its own photo app, apparently—in the cab on the way back to the hotel.

 

"They better be good, for what I paid for them," Bellamy says, loosening his tie. He hates dressing as Benjamin, all skinny ties and slim-fitting dress clothes. 

 

"What _you_ paid?" Clarke asks sweetly, still in her Catherine voice. “I think you mean the government.”

 

That voice again. He’d never heard Clarke speak like that before today. Bellamy is quickly learning that Clarke undercover as Catherine is going to be very different from Clarke as Clarke. Her appearance when he spotted her at the wedding chapel had been jarring, and that was just the beginning.

 

The Clarke he knows does not dress like that. She's all business in her blazers in the office, or ready for action in her FBI field uniform, or decidedly practical in her jeans and t-shirts during the rare moments he encounters her off the clock. With her hair all fluffed and her makeup done, not to mention the white dress that hugs her curves and shows off her legs, she’s like a completely different person. 

 

Bellamy isn't into high-maintenance women, but he has to admit she looks hot in her get-up. She also looks completely at ease, and he wonders how much experience she actually has with dressing like this. He knows she comes from money, because he knows her mother, Abby Griffin, prominent pharmaceutical lobbyist and daughter of a legendary Virginia senator. Her mother is friends with their boss, Kane, and Bellamy has interacted with her enough to know that Clarke comes from the kind of DC family that has never had to worry about money. In fact, Clarke's moneyed background is one of the original sources of resentment between them. 

 

So he shouldn't be surprised that she can slide seamlessly into the character of Catherine, because she probably grew up surrounded by women like Catherine. She has always been so adamantly _not_ like those women, though, so he can't help but wonder if this chafes her slightly.

 

Clarke kicks her shoes off the minute they get inside the hotel room. "Thank god I can take off those implements of female torture," she declares. 

 

The shoes, too, are very un-Clarke-like. Bellamy doesn't want to think about the shoes.

 

"I'm going to change," she continues as she heads for the bathroom. "We have work to do."

 

"A ball-buster already," he says, knowing it will piss her off.

 

He's right. She spins around and marches up to him, shorter now in her bare feet, to face him down.

 

"Okay, seriously? These little jokes you're pulling about 'wife spending money!' and ball-busting? You can cut that crap out right now. I know you love being a dick to me, but I also know you're not a complete piece of patriarchal shit, as much as it pains me to admit it. Your sister wouldn't have let you live with your balls still attached to your body if you actually meant that garbage, so do me a favor and keep those quips to yourself before the real case the FBI has to solve is figuring out where I hide your body."

 

Okay, she’s right about his sister, Octavia, who also works at the Bureau and is friends with Clarke. He doesn’t actually mean that stuff. He just likes to wind her up, and there’s something about wearing Benjamin’s personality that makes it easier to say stupid things.

 

But he doesn’t want to back down or—god forbid—apologize to her, so he shakes his head and says, “Death threats already? We’ve been together for less than eight hours, that has to be a new record.”

 

“I’m serious, Bellamy,” she says. “You and me, we’re all about the button-pushing, but this is not a short assignment. We aren’t getting any breaks from each other for the foreseeable future. Choose your battles wisely.”

 

With that vaguely threatening statement, she spins around again and locks herself in the bathroom. Bellamy removes his jacket and tie and undoes the top buttons of his shirt before sitting back down on the bed with the files he was reading earlier. Clarke’s right, they have work to do. They have their instructions from Kane and their superiors, and they need to work together to hammer out the details of the plan for when they’re back in Mount Weather.

 

Clarke emerges from the bathroom after a few minutes, having changed into black leggings and a black t-shirt—he wonders if she owns any non-work clothing in colors other than black. She’s pulled her hair into a messy topknot and has removed most of her makeup except a slight smudge of black around her eyes and the stain of the lip color she’d been wearing earlier, bringing him back to the kiss they’d shared in front of the photographer.

 

It hadn’t been at all what he’d expected, not that there had been much time to think or prepare. He’d been surprised by the taste of her, and by the way she was softer than he expected, the way he’d been tempted to linger just a moment longer, because Clarke Griffin’s mouth was suddenly a new mystery he needed to solve. A moment of temporary insanity, he’s sure.

 

“I’m ordering room service for dinner, do you want anything?” she asks, jarring him back to reality.

 

“Don’t want to check out the casino buffet?” he asks, attempting to keep things light.

 

“I would if we had time. But we fly out tomorrow morning. I want to get things done so we can get a reasonable amount of sleep.”

 

“Fair enough,” he says, reaching for the room service menu.

 

It takes them a few hours, but they manage to go through the information they have about the Wallace family up to this point and form a strategy for how to introduce Clarke to the them. It’s good for Bellamy because he gets to fully review everything Clarke and the rest of the team back at headquarters have been compiling while he’s been undercover. They have to destroy most of the files before they leave because they don’t want to risk getting caught with them back in Mount Weather, but for now he can take his time and pour over them, which is refreshing after months of only being able to access limited information.

 

Their plan is to fly back to Mount Weather the next day and for Bellamy to casually let the Wallaces know that he—surprise!—married his long-distance girlfriend in Vegas over the weekend. He’s gotten quite friendly with Dante and Cage Wallace throughout the process of wooing them as investors in Benjamin’s hedge fund, and their wives have taken a liking to him too, so it’s probable they’ll invite him and his new wife over for a drink or dinner relatively soon.

 

From there, Clarke will do her best to secure more social invitations from the women. They’re businesswomen, but they’re also socialites, so they’re always organizing or attending luncheons and charity balls and other kinds of society events Bellamy can’t keep track of.

 

“I assume you already know a lot about how this type of social world functions,” he says as he makes notes on a floor plan of the Wallace family mansion.

 

“And why would you assume that?” Clarke asks, pencil in her mouth as she pours over ClearWeather’s publicly available financial records.

 

“You’re going to make me say it?” he asks.

 

“I’m interested to hear your latest take on my background, since you’ve been using it to judge me since I left Quantico,” she replies.

 

“Fine. You come from the kind of world these people circulate in. You know what it’s like to have more money than you know what to do with, and the kind of social calendar that revolves around either spending that money or going to events designed to highlight the fact that you’re giving that money away charitably in the most pubic way possible.”

 

“Has it ever occurred to you, Blake, in your years of getting to know me oh so well, that while my mother may still operate in that kind of world, I made the choice to leave it?” she asks, looking over at him.

 

He’s quiet for a moment before he says, “Still, you grew up in that world. You’re comfortable in it. You can clearly shift into that mode when you feel like it, based on what I’ve seen of Catherine so far.”

 

Her eyes grow flinty. “I’m not _comfortable_ in that world. I can put on the clothes and the hair and the makeup and play the part because yes, I do understand how these sorts of people operate, but that does not mean I’m comfortable or that I like it.”

 

He’s not sure how to respond to that, and before he can come up with something, she continues.

 

“It must really irritate you to have to act like a rich guy,” she muses while looking at him thoughtfully. “I know you’ll do anything for the sake of the case. But having to act like the very people you resent most in the world? That must grate on your nerves like nothing else.”

 

“It actually makes the job easier, because when I don’t know how to act I just ask myself what a douchebag rich guy would do,” he replies. “Look, we need to get this done. We’ll have plenty of time to fight about dumb shit like this when we’re back in Mount Weather.”

 

Clarke shakes her head in exasperation, but they buckle down and focus and Bellamy’s surprised by how the tension between them takes a back seat when they’re working. He supposes it’s been like this before, when they’ve worked on cases together. There tend to be a lot of fireworks between them when they’re initially thrown together, and when they’re in front of their co-workers and friends, but when they actually have to get things done they can slide into work mode and be a pretty effective team.

 

He wonders how much of this kind of work will be happening during this undercover assignment, and how much of their interacting will be more of the fireworks variety.

 

** 

 

They fly back to Mount Weather the next morning, Clarke dressed to travel in an outfit that manages to look simultaneously casual and expensive, with huge sunglasses and a huge handbag. The flight is uneventful, and when they get to the Mount Weather airport Clarke manages to contain her laughter (mostly) when they get to his car in the parking garage.

 

“A Corvette? Seriously? Is that the new Z06?” she asks.

 

“Only the best for Benjamin Becker,” Bellamy replies as he unlocks the door. “And this thing is fun as hell to drive. You know cars?”

 

“My dad taught me about them. Catherine’s name better be on the insurance,” she says as she struggles to fit her luggage in the limited storage space of the sports car.

 

The Corvette does ride nicely as Bellamy drives them through the city and winds his way up into the hills where his condo is located. When they get there, the building is brand new and has a sleek, modern feel to it. This feel extends to the interior of the condo itself, she finds as they go inside and he flicks on the lights.

 

“Wow,” Clarke says as she looks around. “This is quite the douchebag hedge fund manager pad. I can’t believe I’m a hedge… wife.”

 

“More like hedge witch,” Bellamy mumbles as he shrugs out of his jacket.

 

“Hedge witches were known for their wisdom and healing talents,” Clarke says as she runs her finger along the granite countertop in the kitchen. “But nice attempt at an insult.”

 

“Do you want the tour or what?”

 

He shows her around the condo, including the spacious open kitchen and the large living room that opens onto the balcony overlooking the city. It fits his undercover identity well, and she has to admit it won’t be half bad living in this place for a while.

 

Things get awkward when they get to the bedroom. “Who’s sleeping where?” she asks as they stand at the foot of the California king.

 

“Good question,” he replies with a sigh.

 

“You don’t have a spare room?” she asks, knowing the answer.

 

“Benjamin was a bachelor until two days ago,” he says. “Look, I can take the couch, or we can take turns or something. I don’t know, I didn’t really think this part through.”

 

“I don’t think anyone did,” Clarke says.

 

“Seriously, I can take the couch. But all my stuff is in here, and yours will be too, so we’ll be in each other’s space no matter what.”

 

“That’s just a reality of being fake married to each other I think we’ll have to get used to,” she says resignedly. “Okay, well, I guess I should unpack. But then what do we do? How do you spend your days when you’re not with the Wallaces?”

 

Bellamy shrugs. “There’s work to be done. We can communicate enough with people back in DC that we can work on certain parts of the case with them. I didn’t know much about finance before I went undercover so I have Miller feeding me information on what to talk to the Wallaces about when we’re discussing investments. There is down time, though. I’ve honestly been reading a lot of books and doing little projects I was putting off because I was too busy with work.”

 

“Hmm,” Clarke says. “I haven’t had much down time lately either. I’ll have to pick up some art supplies.”

 

“Art supplies?”

 

She feels herself blushing a little bit. “Yeah, I, um, that’s how I like to spend my free time, when I have it. Painting.”

 

“You’re a painter?” he asks. “I didn’t know that.”

 

“I’m guessing there’s a lot we don’t know about each other,” she replies.

 

He stares for a beat and then clears his throat. “Okay, well, I’m going to give Cage a call and talk some bro talk about how his tee time went this morning, look for the right opportunity to casually drop that I got married in Vegas this weekend.”

 

“Good luck feigning interest in golf,” Clarke says.

 

Bellamy’s tactic works well, because as soon as Cage hears the news he invites Benjamin and his new wife to come for dinner at the Wallace family mansion the next night. Clarke spends the day leading up to it exploring the city and getting to know her way around. She takes the Corvette—Kane added her name to the insurance over the weekend, thank god, because Clarke appreciates a well-made car, and the engine in that thing is a dream. She stops at an art supply store to pick up a few things and makes sure she knows how to get to the country club and the shopping district and other places she’s sure she’ll be doing time as Catherine.

 

As dinner approaches, she dresses in a blue gown and pulls her hair back into a sleek chignon, with hair and makeup to match, and when she emerges ready to go she finds Bellamy impeccably dressed again. The way these tight button downs fit his chest and shoulders and the slim trousers hug his thighs is just, well, it’s a problem.

 

“How often do we have to dress up like this?” she asks as she slides carefully into the Corvette, not an easy task in a tight skirt.

 

“Whenever we go to dinner or events,” he says. “There’s a whole slew of philanthropic stuff we’ll be doing as the holidays approach.”

 

“Well then I hope Kane’s wardrobe budget for this operation is unlimited because I don’t know about the men, but the women will not forgive me for wearing the same outfit twice.”

 

“It’s okay, Charity Ball Barbie. I’m sure Lorelei and Patricia will help you go shopping,” he says, steering the car out into traffic.

 

“I hate shopping,” Clarke grumbles. “I wish clothes would just show up on my doorstep a few times a year and I didn’t have to think about it.”

 

“It’s called the internet?” Bellamy says with a laugh.

 

“Shopping on the internet still requires thinking about what you want. I usually get your sister to help me, to be honest,” she admits. “I tell her what I need and she sends me links. I should just give her my credit card and let her do all of it.”

 

“Octavia does love to shop,” Bellamy replies. “She must be jealous you get to buy all this stuff for the assignment.”

 

“I think Octavia is pretty distracted by the case she and Lincoln are working up in Oregon.”

 

Bellamy sighs. “They’re sleeping together, aren’t they,” he says, more reluctant statement than question.

 

Clarke busies herself with her phone, which she has slipped into a new pink and gold case that shimmers in the streetlights. “I can neither confirm nor deny,” is all she says.

 

“I know you’re protecting her because they don’t want the Bureau to find out and give them new partners, but come on, Clarke. I’m her brother,” he pleads.

 

“Exactly,” Clarke says. “I’m sure _if_ there’s anything going on, she will tell you when she chooses to tell you.”

 

“I wish we had a polygraph I could hook you up to,” he grumbles. Clarke just chuckles and ignores him.

 

Her jaw drops when they pull up to the Wallace mansion, which is ostentatious to say the least.

 

“Are they serious?” she asks.

 

“They’re serious. And they all live here together. Get ready to fawn over useless displays of material wealth for the next few hours,” he replies, and then looks at her as he parks the Corvette in a cul-de-sac that has a fountain in the middle of it. “Ready, Catherine?”

 

“As I’ll ever be, Benjamin,” she replies in a silky voice.

 

They walk to the front door, her arm linked through his, and prepare to make their debut as a married couple to the people they’re trying to take down. The housekeeper shows them to the drawing room where Dante and Patricia Wallace, patriarch and matriarch, are having pre-dinner drinks with scion Cage and his wife, Lorelei, as well as a few other couples from their social circle, including the Emersons and the Lovejoys.

 

“Welcome, welcome!” Dante declares, rising to meet them. “Benjamin, we are just beside ourselves with the news that you got married this weekend! Congratulations!”

 

“Thank you, Dante,” Bellamy says, and then he turns to Clarke, smiling as he beckons her forward. “May I present my wife, Catherine.”

 

“It is such a pleasure to finally meet you, Mr. Wallace,” Clarke says sweetly as she extends her hand and smiles. “Benjamin has told me so much about you.”

 

“And yet he’s told us nothing about you,” Cage says as he slides next to his father and reaches for her hand. “Cage Wallace,” he says, clearly enjoying the sound of his own name.

 

“Well, you know how private Benjamin is,” Catherine says, giving Bellamy a confident look to let him know she can handle this asshole. It’s part of the persona Bellamy’s cultivated, revealing little about Benjamin’s personal life and backstory, and she can play to that.

 

“It’s just so sudden,” Cage continues. “I was just telling my wife, we had no idea Benjamin was even seeing anyone, and now suddenly he’s married?”

 

“I know it seems fast, but we’ve actually been dating for a while. When you know, you know,” Clarke says, smiling at Bellamy with an abundance of false love in her eyes. His hand moves to her lower back in what she thinks is some reciprocal reassurance.

 

They’re going to have to communicate a lot through looks and gestures while they’re undercover, and she finds over the course of the evening that they are able to do this better than she’d anticipated. She has to meet and make small talk with a lot of new faces. She finds herself paying attention to what Bellamy says so she can get a sense of how he interacts with these people, and the extent of the relationships he’s built. Dante Wallace seems to trust him fully, while Cage is more hesitant but still friendly. Emerson and Lovejoy appear to be mostly interested in golf and asking about how the blackjack tables treated Benjamin during his time in Vegas.

 

And then there are the wives. Patricia Wallace is a frosty woman who carries herself with a regal air and warms up to Catherine slowly but surely. Clarke knows the type, protective of her inner circle of moneyed family and friends and suspicious of potential interlopers. But once Clarke makes it clear that Catherine is a harmless blonde who comes from money and needs an introduction to Mount Weather society, Patricia is happy to set some wheels in motion to do just that.

 

Patricia involves Lorelei in this welcoming as well. Lorelei, who is the brains behind ClearWeather, also regards Catherine with an air of suspicion at first, but Clarke figures out fairly quickly how to pander to the woman’s ego. It’s clear that Lorelei Wallace wants to be recognized and respected for her intelligence, but the men are too old-fashioned to give her the attention she craves. So Clarke asks the kinds of questions about ClearWeather that flatter Lorelei’s involvement and plays dumb enough so as to be non-threatening, and by the time they sit down for dinner Clarke can tell she has an “in.”

 

She may have chosen to leave this kind of world, but she can still play the game with the best of them.

 

** 

 

The dinner goes well, from Bellamy’s perspective. He’s spent the past three months going to social events with these people, and it hasn’t been easy for him, but he’s managed to cultivate relationships that have some traction and have gotten him closer to what he needed to solve the case. Clarke’s involvement was the unknown. He knew she could dress up and talk like these people, but he wasn’t so sure about her actual interaction with them. Her sarcasm and acerbic wit would not work in this arena, and he wonders if she’ll be able to keep that side of her personality in check.

 

As he learns over the course of the evening, he needn’t have worried. Clarke is brilliant as Catherine. Charming, sweet, just witty enough to get people to laugh but not so witty that she betrays her actual intelligence. She needs these people to underestimate her, to see her as a benign presence, just another pretty woman without much going on in her head.

 

He’s particularly impressed with how she handles Lorelei. Lorelei has always been one of the more difficult personalities in the Wallace family, and Bellamy had no idea where to start with the woman. Clarke, it seems, has her dialed from the get-go. By the end of the evening they’re cooing over the wedding photos on Clarke’s phone, and she’s asked Clarke to join her for lunch the following day downtown near the ClearWeather offices and promised to take her shopping later in the week for a dress to wear to an upcoming benefit to which Patricia is securing them an invitation.

 

Bellamy plays the part of the doting husband. The physical side of it is easier than he expects, doing things like reaching over and putting his hand at the small of her back, or taking her hand in his when they head into dinner, or touching her arm to get her attention at the table. She hesitates at first, displaying a flash of confusion only he can detect, before following his lead and reciprocating the contact. It’s like a subtle dance they’re figuring out as they go, and he’s relieved to find they can read each other with ease.

 

He studies her face a lot, which he figures he can get away with because he’s supposed to be a besotted newlywed, and finds himself focusing on the beauty mark above her mouth, which he’s always known was there but now seems like something new. The blue of her eyes pops with the color of her dress, and she is easily the most beautiful woman in the room. The other men (and Lovejoy’s wife, whom he suspects swings both ways) look at her appreciatively and at him with envy.

 

The only curve thrown at them happens at the end of dinner when Dante clinks a spoon against his glass and the servants start pouring glasses of Moët for everyone.

 

“It occurred to me that you didn’t get to have a wedding reception in Las Vegas, so I thought we might give you a champagne toast right here in Mount Weather,” Dante says. He waits until everyone has a champagne flute before raising his own and saying, “We wish you all the best as you begin your lives together. To Benjamin and Catherine!”

 

“To Benjamin and Catherine!” everyone says as they raise their glasses.

 

Bellamy looks at Clarke and sees the very brief flash of panic as she uses her eyes to ask him what they should do. He’s been to enough weddings to know what a champagne toast involves, so he nods very slightly to reassure her before sliding his hand lightly against the nape of her neck and leaning in for a kiss.

 

It’s not their first kiss, of course, thanks to the photographer at the wedding chapel. But there’s something about this kiss that’s different from the last. They’re slightly further into the undercover operation now, and adjusting to their role as a married couple. This is the audience that really needs to be convinced of the ruse. And he’s been staring at her mouth enough that he knows exactly which part of her lips he wants to pull between his first.

 

It’s meant to be a brief, chaste kiss to please the crowd, but there’s that mystery again, the one that had sparked his attention the first time they’d done this, and its pull is even stronger now. She sighs softly against him and he feels her lips curving into a smile as the kiss ends and they pull away. He’s not sure how much of that smile is for the benefit of the people clapping and sipping champagne around them, but when she meets his eyes through her lashes and raises her glass and says, “To us,” it feels like it’s just for him.

 

It’s a bit of a mindfuck, pretending to be married to someone, he is realizing, and that realization continues to after the dinner is over and the first month of the undercover operation unfolds. It’s very clear to both of them that this is all pretend, and really, a lot of their time is spent working on the case or killing time back at the condo where they don’t have to pretend to be Benjamin and Catherine. But when they’re out in public, and especially around the Wallaces and their friends, they have to be “on.”

 

And being “on,” even though Bellamy knows it’s not real, he can’t completely separate some aspects of the fiction from the reality of certain things that just feel good. It feels good to have someone to share a smile with across a room, or seek out for a squeeze of the hand or a brush against the back in the middle of busy event. He’d been on his own for the months before Clarke joined the undercover operation, and before that he hadn’t been dating much because he was so busy in DC anyway. Having access to human companionship again, even under false pretenses, has more benefits than he realized.

 

Not that he would ever admit that to Clarke. They still bicker and snipe at each other, because if there’s one thing neither of them is willing to do, it’s give an inch. And she reminds him of her annoyance with the situation on a regular basis. But the harshness of their rivalry fades. And every once in a while she’ll lean into his touch a little longer, or laugh at something he says with genuine delight in her eyes, or smile at him so widely something in his chest gives a jolt, and he’s not convinced that she doesn’t also get some pleasure from the companionship.

 

They settle into a routine. They do what they can on the case from home, and then spend time with the Wallaces, each working their angles to gather more information. Clarke especially makes headway on the ClearWeather front, gaining more and more of Lorelei’s trust and meeting more of the people involved with the company. There are social events like lunches and dinners, benefits and golf tournaments that take up a lot of their time.

 

When they’re not busy, they tend to stick to the condo. Bellamy suspects they both see it as the only safe space in Mount Weather where they can be themselves without having to put on Catherine’s and Benjamin’s faces for the world. Bellamy does most of the cooking, because he’s always enjoyed the process of creating dishes, and Clarke doesn’t complain when he feeds her (his comment that feeding her is one way to shut her up is met with a forkful of pasta flung at his face).

 

One of his projects he mentioned to Clarke is teaching himself Latin, and he sits down with his workbooks when he has a spare moment, which Clarke teases him for heartily. She spends her free time painting, setting up an easel in one corner of the living room and painting the city skyline over and over again. He teases her about this until he realizes that each version of the skyline is different, and she’s actually really good.

 

Things go on like this for over a month until one day in early December when Clarke comes home from a lunch date with Lorelei and Patricia, and she’s buzzing with excitement.

 

“I think we have a lead,” she says, dumping her giant leather bag on the couch next to where he’s sitting with his laptop. He has yet to understand why women need such large purses.

 

“Really?” he asks.

 

“Yes,” she tells him as she perches on the arm of the couch. “Lorelei asked me to meet them at the ClearWeather office today before lunch, and I may have overheard something potentially important.”

 

“Don’t they usually have you wait in that fancy reception area with the wall fountain and the adult contemporary?” he asks.

 

“Yes, but I had to use the bathroom, and the receptionist knows I’m a friend of the family so she let me go back to the one near Patricia’s office. I heard her talking in there with Lorelei about shipping records.”

 

“Shipping records,” he repeats.

 

“They were snapping at each other about them. From what I gathered, Patricia marked something on some shipping records that wasn’t supposed to be there, and Lorelei was pissed.”

 

“Did they say what was on the records?” he asks.

 

“No, but they were angry enough that I think it has to be something worth checking out.”

 

“So how do we get our hands on them?”

 

"I think we should try to get into Lorelei's home office. She wouldn't dare store any sketchy records in the ClearWeather office, too many people have access. But she’s an uptight enough person that she wouldn’t destroy records either. Her home office is a safe place for her to keep track of things." Clarke explains.

 

"Where would the records be stored?" Bellamy asks.

 

"That’s the thing, the records could be anywhere—I doubt there are paper copies, though. That’s not Lorelei’s style. But I've seen her with a hard drive in her purse that she brings between her offices. There could be something on that." Clarke says.

 

"Or there could be nothing," Bellamy replies.

 

"If there's nothing, there's nothing. We have to at least try," Clarke persists.

 

"So how do we get the hard drive?" he asks.

 

"Next week they're having that Christmas party at the mansion. There will be so many people there, and so much going on, it's the perfect opportunity to try and break into that office. We find the hard drive, copy the data onto a laptop, and get out of there."

 

"You don't think she locks the door?"

 

Clarke scoffs. "Please. Have you seen my lock picking skills? Not an issue."

 

"Okay MacGyver, what if the hard drive is locked?"

 

"We'll have Raven on a comm to talk us through it, with those tiny earpieces. She and I did that on the San Francisco operation last year, the big tech take-down, when she was still recovering from her knee injury and couldn’t be in the field."

 

Bellamy sighs. "It's still a big risk."

 

"This whole operation is a big risk. We have to take the chance, Bellamy. This could be the key to the whole case. Do you really want to be stuck here longer, dressing like Benjamin and pretending you like golf?"

 

She does have a point.

 

“Let’s run it by Kane and see what he says," Bellamy replies. "But... you're probably right that it’s worth checking out."

 

"Excuse me?” she says, cupping her hand to her ear and leaning closer. “I'm not sure I heard that correctly. Did you just say I'm _right_?"

 

"I qualified it with the word 'probably,'" he says in his defense.

 

She rolls her eyes she shoves him aside so she can slide next to him on the couch, her body pressing against his in the way they're now comfortable being close to each other. "Get my phone out of my purse, Blake. We're calling Kane."

 

**

 

The next week, Clarke prepares for the Wallace family Christmas party with extreme care. She needs to dress so she fits in at the glitzy event, but she also needs to be able to move freely enough to sneak around the mansion and make any quick moves should they have to execute an escape. It's a challenge. 

 

Luckily, Clarke is professionally trained in this kind of thing. She chooses a long black gown embellished with black crystals around top of the bodice, which sits low across her breasts and is held up by thin straps that hit the edges of her collarbone. The tight bodice gives her support up top (which she admittedly needs, stupid breasts), while the skirt has enough fabric and a slit up the side of her left leg to give her range of motion. She wears a pair of black stilettos that are surprisingly okay to walk in. If she has to run, she won't be too sad about ditching them, although she shudders at the thought of Octavia ever discovering that she abandoned a pair of Manolos.

 

She wears a small gun strapped to the inside of her right thigh, because she wants to be prepared for anything. Bellamy will be wearing a gun too, concealed beneath his tuxedo jacket. All in all, it's her favorite of Catherine’s outfits yet. She’ll slip the slim laptop she’s bringing to copy the hard drive into a fancy black bag that matches her outfit, which will also have their comm earpieces ready to be inserted when they head for the office, and be ready to go. 

 

When she steps out of the bathroom she finds Bellamy waiting for her, tugging on the sleeves of his tux as he looks up and freezes at the sight of her. Bellamy in a tux is a sight to behold, his slightly-too-long hair curling against the collar. She generally thinks men’s formalwear is kind of stupid and out-dated, but being around Bellamy when he's dressed up for all these dinners and events they've been attending has gone a long way towards changing her mind. Knowing that he hates wearing it gives her pleasure, too, but lately she finds she doesn't really think about that. She simply appreciates how hot he looks. And he looks _really hot_ in a tux.

 

This is part of a dawning realization that’s been sweeping over Clarke since she started this undercover assignment. She is undeniably physically attracted to Bellamy. Like, a lot. She's always recognized his attractiveness on a basic level, she supposes, but in a begrudging way. _How dare that asshole be_ such _an asshole and so attractive?_ she'd always thought. It was like cruel icing on top of the cake of irritation that was Bellamy. 

 

But since they've been working together, it's become extra apparent that she feels physically drawn to him. She has to see him dressed up, but that's a small part of it. He looks good in his regular clothes, too. She especially likes the way his sweatpants fit. There is also an awful lot of touching involved in this undercover operation. Bellamy had set the precedent that first night at the Wallaces, and she’d picked up on it and reciprocated. They’re supposed to be married, and they give off the impression that they’re one of those couples that’s always finding ways to touch one another.

 

Clarke always found those couples annoying, but playing the part with Bellamy is effortless in a way that kind of scares her. It’s all too easy to slide her hand down his arm and look at him secretively, flirtatiously. At first it felt over the top, but now it feels natural, and she finds herself forgetting when they’re alone at home and nudging her hip or shoulder into his casually or trying to communicate something across the room without words.

 

She wishes she could read his expression now, but it’s inscrutable. She feels the curl of warmth in her belly that she gets when he looks at her appreciatively—which he does sometimes, typically checking himself eventually and hiding it away, but not before she sees it. She suspects that he’s attracted to her too, and she’s not sure what to do with this information. It makes her mind head right for the gutter if she lets herself dwell on it for too long, so she tends to pretend it doesn’t exist.

 

His eyes are cloudier than usual tonight when he gives her that look, and she suspects her own expression is similar, based on the way she can feel the energy practically crackling in the air between them. She’s amped up on adrenaline, too, in anticipation of what they’re trying to accomplish, and this reminds her that this is all for business purposes, that it’s all hard work towards a common goal of bringing down the Wallaces.

 

Which jolts her out of her reverie—seriously, how many freckles does Bellamy have? And why is the juxtaposition of freckles and tuxedo so fascinating all of a sudden—and forces herself to find her voice.

 

“Hey,” she says. “You look nice.”

 

He blinks. “So do you. Ready to go?”

 

They take a limo to the party, and the driver is with the FBI, ready to drive them quickly away should they need to escape. It’s the most dangerous part of their operation yet, and Clarke’s heart beats quickly the entire way to the mansion. She’s nervous, because anything high stakes like this reminds her of her first undercover mission, the one that had gone so spectacularly wrong. She’s so restless that at one point Bellamy reaches over and puts his hand on her thigh to still her bouncing leg, his thumb brushing lightly against the fabric of her dress in a moment so brief she nearly misses it.

 

“You okay?” he asks.

 

“Yeah,” she nods. “Just… a little nervous, I guess.”

 

“Thinking about Miami?” he continues, somehow reading her mind.

 

“Maybe,” she says. It had been a huge disaster when their cover was blown, and even though it wasn’t either of their faults, she still feels guilty about it. She’d been young and inexperienced, desperate to prove herself to Bellamy and everyone else, and in the end they all went down in flames.

 

“Clarke, look… I know we’ve had our disagreements about what happened on that case,” he says. “But there wasn’t anything either of us could have done. Tonight is different. We’ve got this.”

 

Her skin burns where his hand remains on her thigh and she nods. His confidence is reassuring, more than she cares to admit. He slides his hand back after a moment and she looks back out the window, willing her heartbeat to slow.

 

When they get the party it’s already in full swing, people milling about everywhere dressed to the nines. There’s a massive Christmas tree in the large, multi-story entryway where the party is being held, and the room swirls with music and caterers bearing drinks and food, the atmosphere as buzzy and distracting as they could hope.

 

“Well don’t you look amazing,” Lorelei says as she comes over to kiss Clarke on the cheek. “Did you get that dress at the boutique we went to last week?”

 

“I did,” Clarke tells her, returning the kiss. “I had to go back and get it, I couldn’t resist.”

 

Cage Wallace slides his gaze over her in a distinctly creepy way, and Lorelei pretends not to notice, like she always does when her husband does something weird. Not that she’s an expert after six weeks of pretending to have a husband, but Clarke does not understand their marriage.

 

Cage has the nerve to give Clarke a wink before turning to Bellamy to discuss something about Wall Street. They make small talk for a while and Clarke is pleased to see that both Cage and Lorelei are drinking champagne, and at a steady rate. The drunker their hosts are, the better. She has one glass herself, which helps calm her nerves, but she doesn’t want to have so much that she loses focus.

 

They’ve decided to wait until after ten to attempt breaking into Lorelei’s office, which means they have time to kill at the party talking to people like Cage and Lorelei, and the Lovejoys, and the various other bland rich people they’ve cultivated as friends of the Beckers. Mrs. Lovejoy is always giving her the eye and Clarke knows that if she was allowed to be herself, she’d be tempted to strike up a flirtation—Sadie Lovejoy is pretty hot.

 

They talk with Dante and Patricia for a while, and when the live band starts a slow song, they wave Bellamy and Clarke toward the dance floor.

 

“Please, Benjamin, dance with your beautiful wife,” Dante says.

 

Bellamy looks at Clarke and raises his eyebrows, seeking her thoughts on the suggestion. She figures it’s something the Beckers would do, so she raises her eyebrows back in assent and takes his hand as he walks her out into the sea of people. He rests his arms around her waist and she winds hers up and over his shoulders, and it’s actually really nice. She hasn’t danced in years.

 

They fit well against each other, and the music moves them slowly along. Clarke knows they’re being watched, so she allows herself to melt against him, resting her head against his shoulder. His arms envelop her and the feel of his fingers against her back causes sparks to dance in her lower spine.

 

“How are you doing?” he whispers, his breath against her hair.

 

“Good,” she says softly back. “Ready.”

 

“After this dance?” he asks.

 

A smile curves her lips upward. “Let’s do it,” she replies.

 

They slide apart as the music ends and she takes his hand and leads him away from the dance floor, glancing back to share a scandalous smile with him. To anyone who might be watching, they look like a couple sneaking off to have a secret rendezvous in a darkened corner. He smiles wolfishly back at her and her heart leaps like she’s actually about to go somewhere and get laid and god, she cannot wait for this assignment to end so she can stop getting these mixed signals from both her body and her mind.

 

**

 

Bellamy follows Clarke through the crush of people until they’re out of the main room and heading down a hallway. They stop to retrieve her bag from the servants who took their coats and then they keep going. They take a turn down another hallway, pausing only to slip their earpieces in, and soon they’re in the wing of the mansion where Cage and Lorelei’s rooms are.

 

The hallway is empty when they arrive at the door to Lorelei’s office. Clarke tries the handle and finds it locked, so she reaches a manicured hand into her bag and retrieves a set of tiny metal lock picking tools, a smile curving across her red lips.

 

“Here goes nothing,” she says, reaching to turn on her comm. Bellamy reaches up to turn on his own. “Raven, are you there?”

 

“Ready to roll,” Raven says. “Where are you guys?”

 

“We just got to the office, I’m working the lock now,” she replies.

 

He watches her work, her exposed shoulder blades moving as her hands deftly maneuver the picks. She’s calm and focused, and she’s good. She clearly knows what she’s doing. Truth be told, Clarke is a badass. According to her file, she’d been a standout at Quantico because she excelled at everything—practical skills, physical strength, mental acuity—and it’s times like these when he can see how gifted she really is.

 

He keeps a lookout while she works, every once in a while allowing his gaze to rest on her. He’s looking down the hallway when she exclaims a soft “Aha!” and he hears the latch click open.

 

“Nice job,” he says as he follows her inside the darkened room.

 

“We made it in,” she tells Raven.

 

Bellamy switches on a light and they look around the office, unsure of where to begin.

 

“I’ll take the desk, you take those cabinets?” Clarke suggests.

 

“Okay,” he agrees, and they start their careful search, taking pains to only move things minimally so as not to leave a trace of their presence. They aren’t having much luck, and when Clarke encounters a locked drawer she curses and pulls her picks out again.

 

“Can you relock that when you’re done?” he asks.

 

“Of course,” she replies. “I’m not an amateur.”

 

“I didn’t say you were.”

 

“When you question me like that, you imply it,” she says as she turns her pick one last time and opens the drawer.

 

“I’m so glad I don’t have to listen to you two snap at each other all the time over a comm,” Raven sighs.

 

“Jackpot,” Clarke says, and Bellamy walks over to where she’s standing over a small silver hard drive. “Get my bag, Blake.”

 

He hands over her laptop and she opens it on the desk. Plugging in the hard drive, she finds that it is indeed password protected, and Raven’s services are about to come in handy.

 

“We need a password, or a way to get past one,” Clarke says.

 

“Tell me everything—the make and model of the hard drive—and we’ll go from there.”

 

Raven begins talking Clarke through a series of steps that sound like a foreign language to Bellamy. It mostly looks like Clarke trying and failing to enter the correct password, but after a few minutes of Raven’s coaching, something happens and suddenly the hard drive folder opens on the desktop of her computer, and they’re in.

 

They both sigh in relief as Clarke begins downloading the contents. “You’re a godsend, Reyes.”

 

“I know,” Raven replies.

 

The download takes a while, because there are a lot of files, and the more time that passes, the more nervous Bellamy gets. He knows they’re in a part of the house with relatively few people in it, but the risk of getting caught is still there, and the sooner they’re out of here, the better.

 

Clarke is also impatient, tapping her fingers on the desk and staring at the screen. “Come on,” she murmurs as if her words will help the machine work faster.

 

Eventually the download finishes. She’s just pulling the hard drive cable from her computer’s USB drive when they hear voices coming down the hallway.

 

“Shit,” Clarke hisses.

 

“Get it back in the drawer,” Bellamy says, low and calm as he slips her laptop into her bag. She shoves the hard drive back into its place and closes the drawer. The voices grow closer as she fumbles with her picks to relock the drawer. _Come on_ , he thinks, _you can do this, Clarke._

 

The lock clicks into place and the voices are nearly at the door. She shoves the picks in her bag and turns to him, here eyes wide as she says, “Follow my lead,” and grabs the back of his neck to pull his mouth down to hers in a searing kiss.

 

The heat is there from the start, and Bellamy meets her fire with his own as her lips opens under his. He backs her up against the desk until she slides one hip up onto it, her leg emerging from the slit in her gown. Her tongue brushes against his and his hand seems to find its own way to her bare thigh, sliding upward until his fingers dive under the fabric and her muscles flex beneath his touch.

 

Clarke moans against his mouth and he almost can’t believe it, the sound driving his blood straight to his groin as he breaks the kiss to work his way down the side of her neck toward her collarbone. She tilts her head to the side and guides him with her hands in his hair, and when he gets to her shoulder he kisses the delicate skin at the base of her neck and slides her dress strap away until the bodice is held up only where it clings to the curve of her breast.

 

By this point Clarke is leaning back on one elbow, eyes heavily lidded as she watches him where he’s bent over her. It would only take a tug of the fabric to pull it down and free her breast, and by this point Bellamy’s blood is rushing so loudly in his head he’s not sure if there is any compelling reason _not_ to do this. He justifies all of this to himself, thinking that if they’re going to get caught having a tryst they may as well really sell that tryst. His hand is just brushing the underside of her breast through the satin when a voice interrupts them.

 

“Excuse me? What are you doing in here?”

 

Bellamy looks up from Clarke at the two people who have just come into the room—it’s two servants he recognizes from previous trips to the mansion, and they look alarmed at what they’ve found. Clarke is sitting up and turning around, blushing profusely as she tugs the strap of her dress back up.

 

“We’re sorry, we were just…” and she fades off and giggles coyly. “We were just looking for some privacy.”

 

“This is Ms. Lorelei’s private office,” one of the servants says. “This door should be locked.”

 

“Really?” Clarke asks innocently. “It was unlocked, we just wanted to find a quiet place to get away from the party.”

 

“You’ll need to go back to the party now, ma’am,” the servant says. “Guests aren’t supposed to be in the family’s private quarters tonight.”

 

“Sorry about that,” Bellamy says as he straightens his jacket. Luckily his hard-on was still in the early enough stages so as not to be too obvious, but had it been much longer he would have been a lot more embarrassed. He’s pretty sure some of Clarke’s lipstick is now on the collar of his stupidly expensive dress shirt, and his hair is a mess. Paired with her flushed skin and smudged makeup, they look every inch the interrupted lovers. “Come on, Catherine. Let’s get back to the party.”

 

They walk sheepishly to the door and slink down the hallway until they turn a corner and can look at each other. Their eyes go wide and a grin takes over both of their faces as it sinks in that they did it. They were caught, but not in the act of stealing the data. Thanks to Clarke’s quick thinking they had a perfect excuse for why they were in the office.

 

“Good save,” he says, his voice coming out gruff.

 

“That was close,” she says back, and he thinks she’s just about to reach for his hand for some reason when Raven’s voice comes back into their ears, reminding them of her presence on the comm.

 

“Are you guys okay?” she asks.

 

“Yes,” Clarke says. “We’re good now. We should probably get out of here, though.”

 

"Did you guys just make out to get out of a sticky situation? Because I heard moaning," Raven says suspiciously.  
  
"Uhhh," Clarke stammers, not meeting Bellamy's eyes. "Maybe?"  
  
"I know you’re pretend married, but I do _not_ need the soundtrack."  
  
"You should just be glad we're safe," Bellamy says.

 

“I am, dumbass. Now go home and send me the data from that hard drive.”

 

They pull out their earpieces and get their coats, and once they’re back in the limo they’re able to relax a bit, but there’s still a feeling of tension in the air, a need to get as far away from the mansion as possible. The feeling lasts until they get home, and when they finally get through the door and lock it behind them, they both sag in relief.

 

“Holy shit,” Clarke says. “I can’t believe we just did that.”

 

“We just did that,” Bellamy says. “Believe it.”

 

"Raven is waiting for us to transfer the data to her so she can start sorting through the files," Clarke says, whipping the laptop back out of her bag and opening it up. “I’m going to do that now.”

 

"I don't know about you, but I could use a drink," Bellamy says, heading for the fridge. “Want one?”

 

"I'm good, thanks," she says.

 

The glass bottle feels cold against his hands and Bellamy takes a moment to have a deep breath before he lets the cold liquid wash down his throat. They got the data from the hard drive. They're safe. No hellish extraction or collapsed operation. 

 

He can't really relax, though, because he's still reeling from his make out session with Clarke on the desk in Lorelei's office. He knows she initiated it because they needed a cover for being somewhere they shouldn’t be, and it played into the illusion they were going for. But regardless of the intent behind it, the physical effects were very real. 

 

They've kissed plenty of times for the operation, but this was the next level up from kissing. This was basically trying to devour each other on a desk. He'd _wanted_ to devour her. And after weeks of being in close proximity and pretending to be married to her, he thinks he's gotten good enough at reading Clarke to know that she'd wanted to be devoured. 

 

He looks over at where she's perched on the couch, working away, and knows that he still wants her. There's a chemistry between them that can't be denied, and it's been great for the purpose of selling the undercover marriage. What it's not great for is situations like this, where the pull he feels toward her is very real and he's really horny because he hasn't gotten laid in a while, and he gets enough of a taste of her to get worked up, but no satisfaction because it’s all part of a big ruse. It's a situation set up for torture.

 

Unless... unless. He's not thinking with his brain right now, and he's still coming down from the high of the events at the mansion, so clarity of mind is at a minimum. The beer isn't helping.

 

"All finished," Clarke says, closing her laptop and walking over to him, that damn dress swirling around her. "Raven will get back to us in the morning about what she finds."

 

"Do you want to debrief the mission?" he asks, working hard to keep his eyes on her face.

 

“I think it went pretty well,” she says as she comes to a stop in front of him.

 

“Yeah?” he asks.

 

She takes a breath, and her chest rises and falls. “Yeah,” she replies, and when her gaze drops to his mouth, he knows.

 

** 

 

Clarke knows the moment she lets her gaze drop to Bellamy's mouth that she's screwed. She'd been able to push the lingering effects of their encounter at the mansion into the back of her mind while dealing with getting out of there and getting the data to Raven, but now that that's taken care of, her mind is free to return to the problem her body is insisting she address.

 

That problem being the fact that she was extremely turned on by everything that happened with Bellamy tongiht and it's not something she can turn off. His mouth is a problem. So are his hands. So is all of him, to be honest. She can blame the fact that she hasn't gotten laid in ages. She can blame being stuck in close proximity to him for weeks and having to display physical affection for him under the guise of being his wife. But that doesn't really change anything.

 

The fact is that her body is screaming at her that the source to satisfaction is standing right in front of her and, if she's reading him properly, is just as turned on by it all as she is. She's feeling an added energy tonight after the success of getting the hard drive, and it’s that which pushes her judgment over the edge. He drives her crazy. This is a terrible idea. She doesn't care as long as she gets that mouth and those hands on her again.

 

She steps closer and takes the beer bottle from his hand, setting it on the counter. His eyes are burning into hers, his body tense, and she reaches up and pulls his mouth down to hers, because fuck it. She's gotten to know the feel of his lips over the past month and a half when they've kissed in public, but this is different because she can actually explore him, which she’s been dying to do. 

 

His lips are softer in texture than one might think, but firm, along with his jawline, which her hands trail over as they open up to each other in a kiss that deepens quickly. The intensity picks up right where they left off earlier, and after a few moments Clarke's blood is pounding in her ears. 

 

Bellamy's hands find their way around her torso and he walks her backward until they hit the kitchen counter, at which point they break the kiss and catch their breath.

 

"This is probably a bad idea, but I don't care," she breathes, peering up at him through her lashes. 

 

"It's definitely a bad idea, but I don't care either," he replies, and then crashes his mouth back onto hers.

 

It feels so good to finally let herself kiss him for real, to not be worried about who’s watching and whether or not they’re convincing, to give way to the desire that’s been building over their time together and know that he’ll meet her in it.

 

“I mean, we don’t even like each other,” she says against his hair when he starts kissing his way over her ear and down her neck.

 

“We like each other like this,” he says and then his tongue does something to her collarbone that makes her shiver.

 

“Clearly,” she pants. “It’s a physical thing, it’s not like we can—like we can control it or anything.”

 

He spins them around so she’s backed against the counter as he continues to explore the expanse of her neck and shoulder and then his hands slide the straps of her gown down. His fingers find their way to her breasts, moving over them slowly and then cupping them with his palms and giving them a squeeze.

 

Clarke bursts out laughing. “Did you seriously just do that to my tits?”

 

“Tell me you didn’t like it,” he says, his lips curving in a devilish smile and fuck, she is fucked.

 

She pulls his head back down to her chest and he kisses his way down to her cleavage. His hands tug at the fabric of her dress until he pulls the bodice down, revealing the black strapless bra she’s wearing underneath.

 

“Good god, woman,” he says, feasting his eyes on the sight of her full breasts straining against the cups. “These things have been torturing me for weeks.”

 

Clarke slides her hands up his arms so she can guide his hands back over her breasts and together they squeeze again, and it’s extremely erotic to her, watching him touch her like this, touching herself along with him. He runs his thumbs over her breasts where they meet the top edge of her bra and then moves his hands around her back to undo the clasp.

 

It’s a pretty heavy-duty hook-and-eye closure, because Clarke is buxom enough to need real support from a strapless bra, but he does admirably well removing it and soon it’s being tossed aside. The cool air rushes across her suddenly exposed skin and her nipples begin to pucker as that sensation is joined by Bellamy’s mouth and hands. She runs her fingers through his hair and lets her breath quicken with arousal.

 

When he’s worked both of her nipples to hard peaks he lifts his head and straightens, his hands caressing her breasts before sliding around her back. His fingers find the zipper of her dress, and he begins to unzip it before pausing.

 

“What level of bad decision-making are we taking this to?” he asks.

 

“Very bad,” she replies, and she reaches out to pull his hips to hers. He’s hard against her stomach and she feels a pulse of lust at her core. “I don’t want to walk straight tomorrow-bad.”

 

“Fuck,” he groans, pressing against her. “You’ve got a dirty side.”

 

She smiles at him mischievously. “You don’t even know.”

 

His hand yanks the zipper of her dress all the way down and they meet in an aggressive kiss. He shoves the dress to her hips and she frees her arms and steps out of it until she’s wearing nothing but black panties and stilettos.

 

His takes a moment to run his eyes over her body. “Goddammit, you are such a fox, it is not fucking fair.”

 

She smirks and puts one hand on her hip. “What are you going to do about it?”

 

He reaches up and loosens his bow tie quickly, pulling it free and tossing it in the direction of her bra. She reaches out pushes at the lapels of his jacket, which he shrugs over his shoulders and down his arms until he’s free of it. Her hands have already begun to work the buttons on his shirt and soon he’s pulling everything off until he’s topless.

 

He undoes his fly and Clarke’s smirk is back as she watches him, honestly eager to see what he’s packing under there. She’s guessed, for sure, because Benjamin Becker likes tight pants, but now that she has very specific plans for his penis she’s ready to see the real thing. He wears tight boxer briefs, because of course he does, and once he’s down to those she runs her hands over the muscles dipping low on his hips before grasping his waistband and freeing his cock. Her smirk grows wider. Yeah. That’ll do.

 

“Like what you see?” he asks, his voice gruff as she wraps her hand around him.

 

She nods and pumps him once before leaning up to kiss him, and then his hands are back on her, one sliding into her underwear and over her soft golden curls until he finds her already wet. He curses against her mouth and continues to kiss her, his tongue languorously teasing hers as he dips his fingers between her folds until he finds her clit and begins caress it.

 

She moans into his mouth and he continues to slide his hand against her. Her hips tilt as he pushes one finger and then another into her. He begins to move his fingers inside her and over her, and she plays with her breasts, pinching her nipples and giving herself over to the sensations.

 

“Fuck your hands,” she says as she climbs toward orgasm.

 

“You are,” he replies against her neck.

 

“I knew they’d be good at this and I was so mad about it,” she says.

 

He increases the pressure of his motions and growls, “Come for me, Clarke.”

 

His thumb pushes against her clit one last time before everything bursts inside her and she cries out, her inner muscles clamping down over his hand in a steady wave as she comes. She’s leaning back against the counter, her hands holding up her breasts, and when she opens her eyes Bellamy is smiling like the cat that got the cream.

 

She looks down at his swollen cock and knows exactly what she wants next.

 

“When’s the last time you were tested?” she asks.

 

“Like you didn’t read my medical file before you started this assignment,” he says, slowly removing his hand from her pussy.

 

“Fine. Have you fucked anyone since that last clean test?” Because he’s right, she knows exactly what’s in his file.

 

“No,” he says.

 

She wraps her hand around his cock again, swirling her finger over the tip and through his pre-cum. “I’m clean too. And on the pill. And I want you to fuck me. Hard.”

 

She swears she can feel his cock pulse in her hand as his eyes cloud over. She gives him one last kiss before she spins around and leans her elbows on the counter, her ass presented to him. He’s on her in a second, his hands moving over her back and down to her panties until he slides them off. Soon she’s in nothing but her heels, and she feels sexy as hell, and when Bellamy’s fingers find her again she’s warm and wet and so, so ready.

 

She feels him position himself behind her, his fingers dipping into her again before retreating and pushing his cock against her entrance. The thick head slides in slowly and she clenches her muscles around him, her fingers moving to find her clit as he retreats slightly and then pushes again, shoving further this time, and then retreating once more before putting his hands on her hips and pulling her back against him as he sinks in to the hilt.

 

Clarke’s jaw drops at the sensation of suddenly being filled by him, and it’s a completeness that sets her nerves on fire. He pulls out and then thrusts back in, starting a rhythm that her hips instinctively match. Her fingers work her clit and she can feel where he is sliding into her, and god, she hasn’t had sex like this in years, where she simply lets herself relish the feel of her body finding pleasure in—and giving pleasure to—another.

 

His hands move to her breasts and squeeze, using them to leverage his body into hers as he pounds her from behind. It’s exactly what she wants, to be fucked hard, and from his quickening breath and the urgency of his hips, she knows he wants it too, that he’s pouring as much pent up sexual tension into this as she is.

 

When she feels him begin to swell inside her as his orgasm approaches, it turns her on so much she’s soon tumbling once again toward her own.

 

“Come in me,” she cries. “I want to feel you come inside me. Oh fuck, I’m gonna come.”

 

Her legs wobble as her muscles begin to clench again, this time around his cock as he thrusts deep inside her and lets go, her pussy tight around each pulse of his release until he slumps over her back, his breath hot against her skin.

 

“Oh my god,” he breathes. “I need to lie down.”

 

So does she. “Bedroom?” she asks, looking over her shoulder to catch his eye.

 

“Yeah?” he asks. He’s been on the couch since she arrived, the bedroom is really her domain.

 

“As long as we’re making bad decisions now, we might as well go for another round later,” she replies. “I meant it about not walking straight tomorrow.”

 

He kisses her again and one thing about this whole physical gratification thing is that it doesn’t have to involve actual feelings, which makes this kissing stuff kind of confusing. He slides out of her slowly and she reaches for her panties to start cleaning herself up before heading for the bedroom, at which point she remembers she’s still wearing heels and starts laughing.

 

“I can’t believe I just fucked you in high heels,” she says as she kicks them off.

 

“That was hot," Bellamy says as he falls onto the bed. His breath has returned to a more normal rate, but he's still recovering from the bout against the kitchen counter.

 

"It was," she concurs. She hits the light before lying down next to him and taking a deep breath. All of the wired energy she’d had earlier has been replaced by a post-orgasmic mellow, and she yanks the covers free and tosses some at him. Soon they're both ensconced in blankets, heading swiftly towards sleep.

 

**

 

Bellamy wakes the next morning wrapped up in blankets he hasn't slept in in a long time, and he's only confused for a moment until he looks over and sees a cloud of blonde hair on the pillow next to his. His cock twitches as everything that’s now happened between them floods back into his mind. 

 

They’d gone for another round a few hours after the kitchen sex, in the middle of the night when they'd both woken and been unable to keep their hands off each other. He’d been afraid when it first happened that it was going to be a one-time thing, because Clarke was right—it was a bad idea. But then she’d invited him to the bedroom. It was like once the decision had been made to go this route, they’d both tossed all caution (and inhibition) to the wind.

 

It's an interesting situation. They definitely clash over certain things, and have a messy history, but over the course of this undercover operation he’s come to realize that they fundamentally trust each other. And he’s learning that this trust seems to go a long way when it comes to being with each other sexually. Clarke had been more relaxed and free while they were getting it on than he’s ever seen her, and he’s discovering she isn’t afraid to ask for what she wants—she likes to be in charge, but she also likes to be dominated a little bit, and that’s incredibly erotic to him.

 

In the middle of the night he’d woken first and reached for her, because why the fuck not, there was no turning back at this point. He’d wanted to feel her body again, to take his time getting to know her curves, and slowly she’d woken to his touch, curving her ass back against him and guiding his hands to her pussy. He’d entered her from behind again, this time with both of them lying on their sides, his hands roaming over her breasts and stomach, and soon she was writhing against him, her fingers tangling with his to work her clit until she’d come on his cock, the grip of her inner muscles coaxing his own orgasm until he’d emptied himself inside her for the second time.

 

It was a blissful feeling, and Bellamy is full of desire again as he grows more awake. He’d thought maybe having her in the middle of the night would curb the hunger a bit, but no, he’s fully hard and everything he’s supposed to be doing and thinking about for work is shoved aside as his mind and body steer him towards the only thing he wants.

 

He runs his hand over her back and up into her hair, slow and gentle, tangling his fingers in the blonde tresses. He’d wondered what her hair felt like. He freezes slightly as he wonders _when_ , exactly, he starting wondering things like that—clearly there would have been a shift at some point, for them to end up like this, but he can’t pinpoint it.

 

She stirs and opens her eyes, taking him in for a moment before a smile curves over her face. “Good morning,” she says, and she moves slightly, guided by his hand until she’s putting her head on his shoulder and her hand on his chest.

 

He continues to run his hand over her back and then down to her ass, which he likes _a lot_ , and her fingers move over his skin until she reaches down below the covers to find him hard and ready.

 

“Hmm,” she murmurs, stroking him lightly. “More?”

 

He answers her by tilting her head up for a kiss, which she returns as she tightens her grip on his cock. He continues to feel her ass until he slowly guides her onto her back, and her knees fall apart easily so he can shift until he’s between her legs. One of her hands runs over his back while the other guides him to her entrance, and soon he’s sinking into her again.

 

She breaks the kiss to gasp as she adjusts to the size of him, and he relishes the look on her face that goes with it. Her hands move to her breasts, pushing them up so her nipples are positioned for him to duck his mouth and suck, which causes her to moan loudly. He strokes into her at a leisurely pace, tasting her breasts and her mouth and her neck as he enjoys the friction of his cock moving in and out of her.

 

Clarke moves her hips against his to increase the friction on her clit, and he hoists one of her knees higher with his arm to change the angle, causing the pitch of her moans to jump. He can see her breasts bouncing with each thrust in this position, and watching them makes his balls tighten that much faster.

 

“Right there, fuck me _right there_ ,” she moans as he hits a spot inside of her he’s decided is the definition of heaven. “Oh god, oh god, I’m gonna fucking come…”

 

Her voice trails off into incoherent cries of ecstasy as she tumbles over the edge and he can’t believe he’s making her come for the fourth time in less than twelve hours—of course he’s keeping count. The two of them have some kind of crazy sexual connection that he hasn’t encountered before, because he can’t believe how hard he’s about to come again, too.

 

He thrusts as deeply as he can into her as his cock swells and he fills her for a third time, his head dropping to her shoulder, her hands trailing over his back. He feels her breath against his ear and shivers, adding to the goosebumps already covering his body, as he collapses next to her and rolls onto his back.

 

“Okay, I think I might actually need more than a few hours to recover this time,” he says as he throws his arm across his eyes.

 

“Are you admitting weakness?” Clarke asks teasingly. “Wait, let me get my phone, I want to record this.”

 

“Don’t you dare,” he says.

 

“That’s one bonus of sleeping with women,” Clarke remarks. “You can go for hours without stopping, really.”

 

“I made you come four times in—what time is it?”

 

“Almost eight AM.”

 

“Four times in eight hours. That’s an orgasm every two hours. And yet here you are, already comparing me to your past lovers,” he says.

 

“Naturally,” she says. “I wouldn’t want this to go to your head.”

 

She says it with just enough softness, when the Clarke of even a few weeks ago would have taken a sharper tone, and he knows that they are in a place now where things are different, and they need to set some boundaries.

 

“We should probably talk about this,” she says, as if she’s reading his mind.

 

“Besides mutual understanding that it’s a bad idea?” he asks.

 

“If Kane found out, he’d pull one or both of us,” she says. “Which can’t happen. We’re so close to getting something we can use.”

 

“Well obviously we won’t tell Kane,” Bellamy says. “But that probably means we shouldn’t tell anyone else either. I know your first instinct is to call Raven and tell her how awesome I am in bed—“

 

“She already knows how you are in bed,” Clarke quips.

 

“You know about that?” he asks. “It was one time. We were drunk and she was pissed about that moron ex of hers, the one who works for ATF.”

 

“Finn? Yeah, I know all about it. He tried to pick me up when he was still dating her. He’s a total moron. Also, you don’t have to explain yourself to me. It’s not like this is some kind of relationship where we owe each other that sort of thing.”

 

“Obviously,” he says, because the thought of himself and Clarke in a relationship is just—it’s ridiculous. Laughable. The kind of thing they and everyone who knows them would categorize along with pigs flying and hell freezing over.

 

“We can still have sex though,” she says.

 

He pulls his arm off his face so he can see her, because he’d wondered what would happen after this and if she has some kind of plan, he’s all ears.

 

“We’re here for the foreseeable future, acting like these inane rich marrieds. Through some freak accident of nature we happen to have great sexual chemistry, in spite of your personality shortcomings. I’m all for exploiting your body as long as we’re stuck in Mount Weather.”

 

“Hey,” he protests.

 

“You get to exploit mine too, that’s part of the deal,” she replies. “Like… undercover partners with benefits. The only rules are don’t tell anyone and don’t fall in love with me. I know that second one will be hard, I’m awesome.”

 

Bellamy opens his mouth to deliver some yet-to-be-determined witty retort, but he’s interrupted by the loud buzzing of Clarke’s phone on the nightstand.

 

“Speak of the devil,” she remarks as she grabs it and answers, putting it on speaker and tossing it on the bed between them. “Hey Raven, what’s up?”

 

“Good, you’re up. Is Bellamy awake too?” Raven asks.

 

“Good morning, Raven,” he says.

 

“Are you dorks having your morning coffee together or something?”

 

“Something like that,” Clarke replies, suppressing a smile.

 

“I’ve been going through the hard drive,” Raven says. “It’s a lot of boring rich people vacation photos and shit like that, but you were right, Clarke. She keeps records of all the shipments going in and out of ClearWeather’s factory in Mount Weather.”

 

“Did you hear that, Blake? I was right,” Clarke asks, beaming at him smugly.

 

“Yeah yeah,” he says.

 

Raven ignores them and continues. “They receive a lot of shipments of supplies that go into making their products. Chemicals, packaging, stuff like that. And then they ship the finished products out. From what I’ve seen so far, on the surface it all looks like what would be coming and going as part of a cosmetics company’s day to day operations.”

 

Clarke worries her bottom lip with her teeth. “But do you think there might be something more there?”

 

“We know from the financial records we have access to that _if_ the Wallaces are laundering drug money through ClearWeather, their accountants are hiding it really well. But if Lorelei is worried about shipping records having the wrong thing on them and getting into the wrong hands? That indicates to me that there’s something she’s worried about, and that could be the piece we need.”

 

“So how do we find that piece?” Bellamy asks.

 

“I need more time to examine the records and look for patterns, look at which companies are shipping and receiving what, who the carriers are, that sort of thing,” Raven replies. “Miller and I are working on it.”

 

“Is there anything we can do to help?” Clarke asks.

 

“Kane might have some specific instructions for you guys once we brief him on this stuff, but for now just keep working your way in with Lorelei. The more she trusts you, Clarke, the better potential for accessing ClearWeather. It’s also probably not a bad idea to check out the ClearWeather factory. I have a feeling that if we’re right about this, the FBI is going to want to take a closer look at the facility itself.”

 

“It’s on the outskirts of town, close to the airport,” Bellamy says. “We can take a drive out there later today.”

 

“Just don’t be too obvious about it,” Raven cautions. “Clarke told me all about your little red Corvette, Blake. Car like that is hard to hide.”

 

“It’s technically ‘Torch Red,’” Bellamy says.

 

“Sounds chachi as fuck to me,” Raven replies. “Just don’t drive it too close to any security cameras.”

 

“We won’t get too close, we’re not amateurs here,” Clarke says. “We’re just a happily married couple out for a drive. Benjamin is totally the type of guy who feels entitled to hand jobs in his Corvette.”

 

Bellamy’s eyebrows rise as Clarke actually makes a handjob gesture and _winks_ at him, and he struggles not to choke on a laugh.

 

“TMI,” Raven says. “You guys are so gross, I’m so glad I don’t have to be around your fake personalities.”

 

“We’re the worst,” Clarke says happily.

 

After Raven hangs up the phone, Clarke jumps out of bed and heads for the shower, and he lets himself watch her naked backside as she goes because, well, they’re undercover partners with benefits now, he’s allowed to look.

 

She spins around when she gets to the bathroom. “Just so you know, Catherine is totally the type of woman who expects Corvette handjobs to be reciprocated by you going down on me.” And then she gives him a mischievous smile and shuts the door.

 

**

 

After that night, Clarke realizes that while certain things will change now that they’re sleeping together, other things are going to remain the same. There are nearly two weeks left before Christmas, and after the party, their undercover jobs go back to the normal socializing and digging for information. Raven and Miller come up with a possible angle to pursue after analyzing the shipping records, but once Clarke and Bellamy get the lowdown from their partners, there’s not much to do other than wait.

 

“We’ve been looking into all of the companies that ship and make deliveries to ClearWeather,” Miller explains over the phone two days after the party. “There’s a company called TriCrown that delivers some of the chemicals used in the skincare products, specifically acids. What makes this company stand out is that they’re smaller than most of the suppliers ClearWeather uses. In fact, ClearWeather also buys acids from another larger, more mainstream chemical supply company, and according to the invoices, there’s overlap between the kinds of chemicals they’re buying from each company. So the use of this small company feels off, because if they needed more of the same chemical, why wouldn’t they just order more from the larger supplier?”

 

“You sound like you have a theory,” Bellamy says, and Clarke agrees, because if Miller is talking this much, he’s definitely onto something.

 

“The orders from TriCrown are also irregularly timed compared to the other chemical orders. I might be going out on a limb here, but we suspect the Wallace family of being involved in trafficking methamphetamine, right?” Miller continues.

 

“Among other drugs, yes,” Clarke says. “We know some Wallace family affiliates are involved in the street trade of meth here in Mount Weather, but we haven’t been able to draw any clear connections.”

 

“Well, what if the Wallaces are also involved in meth production?” Miller asks. “Think about it. I know you’ve seen _Breaking Bad._ One of the hardest parts of making meth is sourcing the chemicals used to make it. The Wallaces have a company that manufactures products that require chemicals. They have the perfect cover for buying large quantities of chemicals, and a facility to receive them. But for meth, they would need certain things that aren’t used to make ClearWeather products, the kind of thing that if you ordered it from a large company would raise red flags, like methylamine.”

 

“So you think Dante Wallace is some kind of aspiring Walter White?” Bellamy asks.

 

“No,” Clarke responds. “He thinks Lorelei Tsing Wallace is some of kind of aspiring Walter White. Right Miller?”

 

“She was halfway through a Ph.D. in chemical engineering before she dropped out of her program and married Cage Wallace,” Miller explains. “She’s been the driving force behind ClearWeather from the start. If anyone in that family has the brains to orchestrate meth production, it’s her.”

 

“So how do we test this theory?” Bellamy asks. “We’ve been going after the Wallaces from a financial angle this whole time, trying to get them on money laundering and fraud. We know about the trafficking too, but we have little evidence of that due to the distance they keep from the people actually carrying that work out.”

 

“Yeah, but if we can prove they’re involved in manufacturing the drugs? That’s huge,” Clarke says. “We have to do it. The question is how.”

 

“We get eyes on the ground at TriCrown’s next delivery,” Raven explains. “The hard drive contained backups to Lorelei’s office computer, auto-saved a few times throughout each day. There’s nothing on that computer that’s incriminating, but the backups do include the company calendar, which has scheduled deliveries entered into it.”

 

“Great,” Clarke says. “When’s their next delivery?”

 

“9pm on Christmas Eve,” Raven says.

 

“Really? Who schedules deliveries on Christmas Eve?” Clarke asks.

 

“Small chemical supply companies that want to fly under the radar and the people who buy from them,” Raven explains. “Think about it. The factory will only have a skeleton crew since most people will be off for Christmas. It’s the perfect time to receive a shipment of something you don’t want people knowing about. So I hope you guys are cool with working on a holiday.”

 

“It’s part of the job,” Bellamy says, and he’s right. If Christmas Eve is the time to go after these guys, they have to do it. “How do we get in?”

 

“We need to loop Kane in on this, because if you two go in, you’re going to need backup. And it’s not like you can just walk into the factory unnoticed.”

 

“Good point,” Clarke replies. “Okay, let’s bring in Kane and make a plan.”

 

After that, they still have a week and a half to kill before Christmas Eve. So the day-to-day routine stays basically the same, except now they’re having sex. _Lots_ of sex. It’s like once they get started, they have an unspoken agreement to take advantage of every free moment they can to have each other in this capacity. Clarke has always enjoyed sex, and has considered herself open to exploring her body and working with her partners—both casual and in relationships—to experiment with pleasure.

 

But there’s something about sex with Bellamy that’s different from what she’s had before, with anyone else. Part of it is certainly the competitive side of their relationship, the battle of wits and pushing of each other’s buttons that translates remarkably well into a sexual context. Without specifically agreeing to it, they start going back and forth initiating sex in new and interesting positions and places.

 

It began with the ride in the Corvette. They’d driven by the factory as if out on a leisurely Sunday afternoon cruise, circling just enough to get a sense of various entrances and delivery locations and the lay of the grounds around the building. Then Clarke had directed Bellamy to drive up into the hills around Mount Weather towards a lookout point. Once they were on the highway she’d reached over and put her high on his thigh, and he’d looked over at her in disbelief.

 

“I wasn’t kidding about the handjob, or the reciprocation,” she’d said, and she hadn’t been. It was a turn on for her, being in a position of power while he drove, and there was something about a red sports car that just screamed raunchy sex. She’d carefully freed him from his pants and worked him with her hand until he pulled into the lookout parking lot, which was mercifully free of other cars, throwing the Corvette into park as he let out a strangled breath.

 

At this point she realized she didn’t have anything in the car to clean up after this with, so she’d switched tactics, moving onto her knees and taking him between her lips instead. The string of expletives he released made her smile around his cock and she’d licked and sucked and used her mouth and hands to bring him to completion, swallowing as he came.

 

She’d climbed into his lap afterwards and kissed him, the taste of him mingling with that of his tongue, and he’d reached down to hike up her dress and get her primed with his fingers. Once she was panting he’d laid her back on her seat, removing her panties and ducking his head to reciprocate just like she’d told him to. She’d been pleased when he used his hands, too, and soon she was writhing on the leather seat, her legs hooked over his shoulders as her hips ground into his mouth with her orgasm.

 

It was pretty fucking hot, and it was only the beginning. In the week and a half they have to kill, there’s plenty more sex back at the condo, with Clarke giving in and telling Bellamy he might as well just sleep in the bed every night. They don’t limit themselves to the bed, of course. They christen the couch, and the kitchen floor, and the dining table, and even the balcony, where he fucks her from behind while she hangs onto the railing. The fuck against the inside of the front door, and a few of the walls. They have sex in the shower, even though Clarke advises that it’s risky given the slippery surfaces, and after an initial slip they slide down into the tub where she rides him to completion, his hands on her wet breasts.

 

The challenge is still on outside the condo. One afternoon, when Clarke meets Patricia, Lorelei, and Sadie Lovejoy at the country club for doubles tennis, she runs into Bellamy, who happens to be there for a round of golf with Dante and Cage. Soon they’re in one of the club’s fancy bathrooms, her tank top pushed up to expose her breasts and her tennis skirt hiked up to her waist as he fucks her on the counter next to the sink. She’s insanely turned on by the entire thing and has to bite her hand to stay quiet when she comes, and the rest of the afternoon she can feel a warmth where he’d been inside her.

 

It must show on her face as well, because Lorelei calls her out on it. “You and your husband are just the picture of newlywed bliss, aren’t you?” she says while they’re having a drink after their game.

 

Clarke blushes and stammers, channelling Catherine’s humblebrag modesty. “I know it’s cliché, but we really just can’t get enough of each other.”

 

“I know. My staff told me they caught you canoodling in my office at the Christmas party,” Lorelei says.

 

Clarke’s heart stops, because she’d been afraid of this, and she wills herself to stay calm and play dumb. “Oh, I am so sorry about that, how embarrassing,” she says in sugary remorse. “We really didn’t know where to go and that was the first open door we found. You know how it is when you just get carried away.”

 

Lorelei smiles at her coolly, her eyes slightly narrowed as she considers Clarke, but she eventually she seems to buy into the ruse. “Indeed,” she says. “Enjoy this phase of your marriage, Catherine.”

 

Clarke is certainly enjoying Bellamy, and she’s not completely sure what to make of that, since not only is the sex amazing, the rest of the time with him isn’t bad, either. In fact, this whole undercover operation has been a lesson in the fact that they don’t actually dislike each other as much as they pretend they do. She realizes that deep down there’s a part of herself that’s always wondered, if Bellamy hadn’t been biased against her from the beginning because of who her family was, and if the Miami operation hadn’t gone so wrong, if they could have been friends. Maybe that time has finally come.

 

She thinks of this especially on the day before Christmas Eve, after they’ve spent all day preparing for the factory operation, and Bellamy makes a nice dinner—“Since we’ll be busy tomorrow night, might as well have a little Christmas Eve dinner tonight.” They end up lying spooned together on the couch afterwards, because Clarke starts to initiate some couch sex and it quickly becomes apparent that they both need to digest their food a bit more first. So they just talk instead.

 

“Are you sad to miss Christmas with Octavia?” she asks him. If there’s anything she knows about Bellamy, it’s how much he loves his sister.

 

She can feel him shrug behind her. “She’ll be with Lincoln in Oregon. They only have a few days off, so they’re just staying out there.”

 

“Did she tell you anything yet?”

 

“Not explicitly, but she’s definitely talking like she assumes I know something’s up. Once we’re in the same place at the same time again we’ll be having a conversation.”

 

“That’s good,” Clarke says.

 

“Are you sad to miss Christmas with your family?” he asks.

 

Clarke snorts. “You mean my mother? No. Christmas to her is nothing but an opportunity to be seen at the right parties and send tasteful cards to the right people. I used to love Christmas before my dad died, but since then it’s just never held the same appeal.”

 

“My mom was never big on Christmas,” Bellamy says. “She knew she couldn’t buy us much, so she tried to downplay it as much as she could. I didn’t really care, but Octavia still got caught up in the mania of the season, so I did what I could to make it special for her.”

 

“You’re a good brother,” Clarke says. She’s learned more about Bellamy and Octavia’s younger years over the course of this undercover operation, and she thinks she understands better now why he is the way he is about certain things, like money.

 

“Is that a compliment, Griffin? Let me get my phone, I want to record this.”

 

“Shut up,” she says, elbowing him softly behind her. “I don’t have a sibling, so I’m not exactly the best judge, but I know you both, and what you guys have is special. Let me know when you call her tomorrow, I want to say hi.”

 

They keep talking until Clarke drifts off to sleep, and she doesn’t know how long she’s out before she wakes as Bellamy is lifting her into his arms to carry her into the bedroom.

 

** 

 

On Christmas Eve, the plan for spying on the TriCrown delivery to the ClearWeather factory is fully in place. Kane, Raven, and Miller have all arrived in Mount Weather, along with enough agents from both DC and the local field office for a full team to be in place should they need to do a full raid. Kane wants them prepped for all scenarios. The plan is for Raven to gain access to the factory by overriding the security system so she and Bellamy can get inside and find their way to the receiving area, while Clarke and Miller will be positioned close to that same area on the outside. The four of them will watch, record audio, take photographs, and be prepped to call in the rest of the team if needed.

 

Raven and Miller come to the condo while Kane and the others get vans and equipment and start setting up near the factory. Raven walks around the place, eyeing it with a smirk, while Miller ignores everyone in favor of playing Neko Atsume on his phone “to get into a zen place” before they head out.  

 

“So this is your little love nest,” Raven says. “It’s pretty nice, if a bit too finance-bro for my tastes. I’m guessing Clarke didn’t have a hand in decorating?”

 

“It was all set up before even I got here,” Bellamy tells her, adjusting his holster underneath the janitor’s jumpsuit he’s wearing to match Raven’s so they blend in when they’re inside the factory. “Neither of us got any input.”

 

“Got any input in what?” Clarke asks as she comes out of the bedroom, dressed for the operation all in black with her hair pulled back in a braid, a look he hasn’t seen on her in a while. It’s different, now that he knows what she looks like out of those clothes, with her hair down. He makes a mental note to tell her to keep the outfit on after this is all over, so he can have the pleasure of taking it off and unwinding her hair himself. Something about undoing the serious FBI agent version of Clarke is very appealing to him.

 

Not that he should be thinking about that right now, but coming up with ways to seduce each other has been such a big part of the last two weeks that switching into real work mode again, especially with their colleagues here in person, is an adjustment. Being around people who know them—the _real_ them, not Benjamin and Catherine—is also something he hadn’t really thought of preparing for, and he finds himself checking his instincts to look at her a certain way, or reach out and touch her, because they don’t want to get found out.

 

“The décor,” he replies to her question.

 

“Oh, right,” Clarke says. “Yeah, they gave me a budget for useless handbags but not for interior decorating.”

 

Raven just looks at the bedroom thoughtfully and says, “Mmmhmm.”

 

They need to get to the factory well before the delivery is scheduled so Raven has time to work and the team has time to get in place. Once they have everything they need, they rouse Miller from his game and he and Raven head down to the unmarked black van they’ll be taking, while Clarke and Bellamy grab a few last things before locking up the condo.

 

He watches her as she works the key in the lock, her lips pressed together in concentration, and when she turns to him, she looks mildly surprised to find his gaze on her.

 

“What?” she asks.

 

“Nothing, just…” and he can’t help it, he leans down and gives her a quick kiss. “Good luck tonight.”

 

Her look of bafflement is quickly replaced by a smile. “Thanks. You too.”

 

Kane and the others have been near the factory all afternoon scouting and choosing the perfect location for everyone to be positioned. They’ve identified an entry point for Raven and Bellamy to gain access, and chosen a location to park Miller and Clarke in line of sight of the receiving area. Everyone is connected via comm, and once they get everyone into position, Raven and Bellamy make their move.

 

They go swiftly and silently to the door. Raven had been out of commission for a while due to a knee injury incurred while working a case, but Bellamy can see she’s back to full range of motion and he doesn’t doubt she put a lot of hours into rehabbing it because Raven does nothing by halves. She has a small set of tools and devices at her disposal to work the security system, which is key-card activated. He’s not really sure which she uses to do what, but after a few minutes of intense concentration the light on the lock turns green and they hear a click.

 

“Fuck yes,” she says. “We’re in.”

 

“Nice work, Reyes,” Kane says over the comm. “Now head for the receiving dock and stay out of sight.”

 

The factory is mostly deserted, thanks to it being a holiday, and they’re able to make their way through the hallways toward the end of the building where deliveries are made. At one point they do hear someone coming, and have to duck into a side passage, but it’s just a janitor pushing a broom and whistling “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

 

Bellamy’s heart is racing, but he’s trained for this, so he stays calm as they progress through the factory until they get to the receiving area. There’s nobody around yet, so they do a quick scan and take some photos before getting into position. Raven climbs like a cat onto a large metal shelf where she can crouch behind a row of large plastic barrels. Bellamy flattens himself on the ground behind a dumpster filled with empty cardboard boxes, where he can angle himself to see beneath it and around the sides.

 

“In position and ready to go,” he says into the comm. “Griffin, Miller, where are you guys?”

 

“About two hundred feet back from the loading dock on the northwest side of the building,” Clarke answers.

 

“Excellent,” Kane says. “Now we wait.”

 

A few minutes before nine, Bellamy hears footsteps coming and soon sees two sets of feet walking into the receiving area. He doesn’t recognize the voices, but that’s not surprising. The Wallaces likely have a few trusted henchmen working the delivery, and they’ve been careful to keep him away from the seedier aspects of their business.

 

The men don't say much, just prep the area, one of them starting up a forklift and driving it around. After a few minutes there's a buzzing sound and the metal door of the loading dock rattles upwards. 

 

"Incoming," Clarke says softly over the comm. Bellamy can see just enough to know that there's a truck backed up to the dock, and once the door is all the way up the men get to work, joined by one more, likely the driver of the truck.   

 

Bellamy moves silently to his feet so he can better see around the dumpster, to observe what the men are offloading. It looks like large metal barrels. 

 

"Take it straight to the lab on level C," one of the men says.

 

"That's methylamine," Raven says into the comm once the forklift starts going. "I got my scope on the label. They've also got a load of cardboard boxes, unlabeled, but I bet if we opened them up they'd have something interesting inside."

 

"Your positive that's methylamine, Reyes?" Kane asks.

 

"Yes," she replies. “One hundred percent. In a quantity ClearWeather is definitely not licensed to be in possession of.”

 

"Okay. Get as many photos as you can, but don't move until we get the team into place to come in and back you up," Kane commands.

 

The offloading continues and Bellamy can't see much, but he's able to get a few shots of the truck. He's using his scope to try and get more details of the unlabeled boxes when he suddenly hears the click of a gun being cocked, and his blood runs cold.

 

"I wouldn't move if I were you," a female voice says, and he turns around slowly to find Lorelei Wallace aiming a handgun at him.

 

"Well, isn't this interesting," she continues, a calculating smile spreading across her face. "Benjamin Becker in a janitor's uniform, skulking around my factory on Christmas Eve. I knew something was up when security called to let me know they saw some additional janitors on the surveillance cameras, but I didn’t realize you were moonlighting." 

 

"I got the second one, boss," a male voice says. A third henchman has a gun trained on Raven where she's hiding in the shelves, and he gestures with it. "Why don't you make your way down from there, little lady?"

 

Raven practically snarls at the guy, but she doesn't have much choice other than to follow instructions.

 

"Hmm, and it's not even that bitch wife of yours," Lorelei says. "But I'm going to guess she's not really your wife. Who do you work for, Benjamin?"

 

Bellamy grits his teeth and holds his ground, saying nothing. Lorelei reaches for his scope and camera, pulls them from his hands, and smashes them to the ground.

 

"I knew we couldn't trust you two," she muses after she’s destroyed the equipment. "From the start, I told Cage and Dante to be cautious, but they bought your bullshit investment promises hook, line, and sinker. Stupid goddamn men."

 

She stalks closer, her high heels clacking on the cement floor, looking like she's just come from a holiday party. "You broke into my office, and now you’re in my factory, uninvited. You don't know what you've gotten yourself mixed up in. I'm going to need you to _tell me_ who you work for."

 

Bellamy shakes his head, staring her down.

 

"What's the problem, Benjamin? You don't take me seriously?" she asks fiercely. "I don't think you understand how far I’m willing to go to protect my business interests."

 

"What are you going to do, shoot me?" Bellamy asks. 

 

"You idiot," Clarke says over the comm.

 

"Actually, I might do just that," Lorelei says. She reaches up and yanks the piece out of his ear. "She's wearing an earpiece too," she shouts at her henchman, who pulls roughly at Raven's ear.

 

"You don’t take me seriously," Lorelei says, her eyes cold with a steely anger now. "You’re just as dumb as every man who’s ever underestimated me. I’m going to ask you one more time. _Who do you work for_?"

 

Bellamy just stares her down again.

 

“If you’re not going to answer me, I’m just going to assume you’re expendable,” she seethes. He sees the moment she makes the decision, when she actually shrugs and points the gun. He really doesn’t believe she’s going to do it, though, until the gun goes off. After the shot, there's a moment of silent shock before a world of pain descends on him and he falls to his knees.

 

His head is roaring like a freight train and his stomach is on fire, but he hears someone shout “Bellamy!”

 

The last thing he sees before everything goes dark is a flash of blonde hair, and Clarke’s face. 

 

*

 

"Bell."

 

Everything is cold, and scratchy, and fuzzy. So fuzzy. 

 

"Bell. Bellamy."

 

And bright. Way too bright. He tries opening his eyes, only to be met with a harsh glare from above. 

 

"What—" he tries to speak, but his voice can't quite catch in his throat. 

 

Someone leans over him and presses a plastic cup to his lips, mercifully blocking out the glare. He takes a swallow of water gratefully but can only handle so much before he shakes his head and the cup is removed. Gradually his vision clears, and he can make out the person hovering over him.

 

“Octavia?” he rasps, taking in the sight of the sister he hasn’t seen since the summer.

 

“In the flesh,” she says, unable to keep a smile off her face. “God, am I ever glad to see you awake.”

 

Bellamy attempts to sit up, only to be met with a stabbing pain in his abdomen, causing him to wince and suck in a breath.

 

“Yeah, I wouldn’t do that,” Octavia says. “Just lie back. You’re going to be fine.”

 

“What happened?” he asks, his voice coming out in a whisper.

 

“You got shot in your left side. The bullet hit your small intestine but nothing else, and luckily they were able to patch you up in surgery. It could have been a lot worse,” Octavia explains.

 

“Lorelei Wallace,” Bellamy says, the events starting to come back to him through the fog. “She actually shot me.”

 

“Lady really wanted to protect her meth lab,” Octavia replies.

 

“Clarke,” he says, suddenly worried. “Is she okay?”

 

“She’s fine,” Octavia tells him, and he releases a breath. “She was here, actually. I found her asleep in the chair next to you when I got in from Oregon.”

 

“Did we—What happened after I got shot?”

 

“From what everyone’s told me, Clarke ran in against Kane’s orders and got there guns blazing right when that bitch shot you. But it all turned out okay because Miller and the rest of the team were right behind her, and they managed to get meth lady and her cronies into custody before anyone else got hurt. Well, before any of our people got hurt. It sounds like Raven did some damage to one guy’s balls.”

 

“We got Lorelei?” he asks.

 

“And her husband, and Dante and Patricia Wallace, too,” Octavia explains. “And several other members of their crime ring. Turns out you guys were right about the meth production angle. They had a lab in the basement of the ClearWeather factory, and they were packaging their product in lotion containers. There’s a skin cream I won’t be buying anymore, not that they’ll be in business after this.”

 

“Jesus,” Bellamy says. “All those months working the financial angle and at the end of the day we get them for cooking meth.”

 

“You’ll get them on money laundering and fraud too, don’t worry. You guys built up a good case against them. It’s a huge take-down. And you got TriCrown, too. That delivery truck had a bunch of pseudoephedrine in it along with the methylamine. Which, seriously, how dumb is that, moving illegal quantities of multiple controlled substances at the same time? They were like a wholesaler for meth labs.”

 

“So it’s over,” he says.

 

“Merry Christmas, brother,” she says, smiling.

 

“You had to leave Oregon,” he says.

 

“You got shot,” Octavia replies, the emotion coming through her voice. “You know I’d go to the ends of the earth for you, you big dummy.”

 

“Did Lincoln come with you?”

 

“Yeah,” she says, blushing as she smiles. “He went to get use something to eat. I requested Christmas dinner from McDonald’s.”

 

“Like we had when you were little before I knew how to cook,” he says, his heart swelling. God, he’s missed her.

 

“Exactly,” she says.

 

“You’re sleeping with Lincoln, aren’t you,” Bellamy says, because there’s no point in putting off the conversation.

 

“Um, we’re actually engaged,” she admits, a sheepish look on her face.

 

“ _What_?” he exclaims, angry that he can’t sit up. “Since when?”

 

“Since last night. He proposed before we got the call that you’d been shot. Way to steal my thunder, dude,” she teases.

 

“Good luck hiding your relationship from our bosses now,” Bellamy says. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell _me_ until now.”

 

“I’m sorry,” she says. “We didn’t tell anyone. Clarke knew because she’s friends with both of us and she guessed. Everyone else just strongly suspected.”

 

“I’m happy for you, Octavia,” he says, reaching for her hand, and he means it. He might cry if he wasn’t on so much morphine.

 

She leans over and kisses his brow. “Speaking of partners, I’m pretty sure Miller is waiting outside to see you. He sure is into that cat game. I’ll go get him.”

 

Bellamy manages to stay awake for a little while longer, seeing a few people and eating some dinner with Octavia and Lincoln. He waits for Clarke to come back, but she never returns.

 

** 

 

Closing the case after they get Lorelei and the rest of the Wallaces takes about as much time as Clarke expects, with debriefs and statements and paperwork. So much paperwork. Under normal circumstances, she’d be sharing the paperwork with Bellamy, but he’s recuperating from a gunshot wound and she doesn’t want to pile work onto him. So she does it all herself, and it’s a lot, but it distracts her, which is what she wants.

 

She’d defied Kane’s orders and run into the factory, intent on saving Bellamy and Raven, because based on her understanding of the situation, waiting was no longer an option. Bellamy had poked the bear, and Clarke heard the tone in Lorelei’s voice. She really would shoot him. She did shoot him. Clarke had arrived just in time to see Bellamy fall and it had felt like she was taking a bullet to her own stomach, her voice escaping her body as she called out his name and ran to him, thinking of nothing but staunching the flow of blood.

 

She’s admitted her wrongdoing repeatedly to her superiors, because that’s what you do when you fuck up in the FBI, even when you know you made the right call. She’s admitted it, and she knows she would do the same thing all over again. They’d had backup, and the rest of the take-down had gone relatively well. Kane had even conceded (sort of) that while she’d broken protocol, had they waited longer to go in things may have gotten worse, and at the end of the day they got the bad guys, so. She’s reprimanded, and they move on.

 

She’s grateful for the distraction of wrapping up the case because seeing Bellamy get shot had done something to her, and she’s terrified by it and doesn’t know what to do. She’d thought everything was neatly tied up in a package with them, the perfect beneficial arrangement, until she’d seen him go down, and then _pow._ Feelings. A whole fucking avalanche of them piled right on top of her heart. None of them make sense to her except that him dying was not an option.

 

She needs time to think, but she doesn’t want to _actually_ do the hard thinking she knows she needs to do, so work is the perfect diversion. The problem with work, though, is that because she’s reporting on an undercover operation that he’d been involved in, she has to think about him all the time, even for the practical purposes of writing up everything that had happened. It’s not ideal.

 

This is coupled with the fact that she hasn’t seen him since he was asleep in the hospital after his surgery. She’d ridden in the ambulance with him from the scene and been privy to the intense process of the EMT’s working to save his life, which she’s sure has taken a few years off of her own. Waiting for him to get out of surgery had been agony, one she’d endured with Raven and Miller by her side, and it’s something she never wants to go through again.

 

When they’d finally gotten word that he was going to be okay, the other two had left to get some rest, but Clarke had stayed until they let her see him. She sat by his bed and swore at him for a number of reasons, and finally let herself cry, silently in the hospital chair, while she watched him sleep, his freckles startlingly defined against the pallor of his skin. She’d held his hand until she couldn’t bear the texture of his skin anymore, because it reminded her too much of the feel of it against her own just the morning before when they’d woken together and had sex one last time before everyone else arrived.

 

She was a complete mess about him, and when Octavia had arrived, she’d taken the opportunity to leave, because she couldn’t bear it any more. She wanted to throttle him when he woke up, and for what? For blindsiding her by being someone she could actually fall for instead of the pain in her ass she’d thought he was for years? For all she knew he might still think of her as a pain in _his_ ass, in spite of the intimate turn they’d taken, and she was not prepared to deal with that, or with any potential outcome of the situation. So as soon she’d heard he was awake and on the mend, she left.

 

She’d supervised the packing up of the condo and helped bring the local authorities up to speed on the case, and once all the loose ends were tied, she headed back to DC to wrap the case up there. She rings in the New Year alone in her office, and when there’s no more paperwork to be done, she lets herself catch up on sleep, the emotional and physical exhaustion of everything finally taking its toll.

 

When Bellamy is well enough to travel, he’s flown back to DC to finish recovering at home, accompanied by Octavia. Clarke toys with the thought of calling him, just to say hi and see how he’s doing, but she can never quite work up the nerve, and the longer she puts it off, the more scared of doing it she becomes. Because she has no idea what to say other than _Remember that time you got shot and it made me realize I wasn’t just emotionlessly fucking you?_ _That was fun._

 

Things go basically back to normal at the office, other than the fact that Bellamy isn’t back yet and won’t be until he’s fully healed—which she’s sure means he’s going stir-crazy. All she needs is to gets her routine going again and things will, well, she’s not really sure where things are going to go next, but she hopes routine will bring some kind of order back to her world, which has been considerable shaken by her realization that she has feelings for Bellamy.

 

She keeps the charade up to herself until one day when she’s getting ready to leave the office and Octavia corners her.

 

“What are you doing, Griffin?” she asks with an exasperated look on her face.

 

“Going home?” Clarke answers.

 

Octavia sighs. “I mean about Bellamy.”

 

“What about him?” Clarke asks in a voice she knows is feeble.

 

“Don’t bullshit me, Clarke,” Octavia says. “You haven’t been to see him. You haven’t even called him.”

 

“I just… I wanted to give him space while he’s healing,” she says.

 

“Look. I don’t know what happened between you guys in Mount Weather, but he misses you. He won’t say it, but I know it’s bothering him. And on top of that he’s bored and he’s moping and Kane won’t let him work. Please, Clarke. If you want to help him, go and see him.”

 

Clarke feels her cheeks burning and her heart thudding. Octavia’s words punch through the flimsy excuses she’s been holding up and she knows she needs to stop avoiding him. She has no idea what will happen when she sees him, and it scares the shit out of her.

 

“Okay, I’ll stop by tonight,” she says hesitantly.

 

“Thank you,” Octavia says, her shoulders dropping in relief. “Do you know where he lives? I’ll give you his address.”

 

Clarke toys with the idea of going home and changing first but she figures it might be too tempting to lock herself in her bathroom and never leave, so she decides to face things head on and just get it over with. She heads in the direction of his place from work, stopping along the way to pick up the kind of ice cream she’d learned he likes while they were undercover, chocolate marshmallow. Her heart hasn’t stopped thudding since she talked to Octavia, and now it’s joined by the knots in her stomach.

 

Bellamy lives in a three-story walk-up in a neighborhood closer to hers than she realized, and she hits the buzzer number with some trepidation. Maybe he’s asleep. Maybe she’ll just go eat this whole carton of ice cream on a park bench by herself.

 

“Hello?” his voice crackles through the intercom.

 

“Hey, it’s, um, it’s Clarke,” she says.

 

There’s a pause, and she thinks at this point she can actually hear her heartbeat, and then, “Hey. Come on up.”

 

He buzzes her through and she makes her way up the stairs, the ice cream cold in her hands. He opens the door before she can raise her hand to knock, and she’s reminded suddenly of the day he met her in Vegas, when she’d opened the hotel room door on him.

 

“Hi,” he says. He’s wearing the grey sweatpants she likes and a black t-shirt, and his hair is rumpled, and he looks like he’s lost weight, but overall he looks good. Better than she expected. Granted, the last time she’d seen him he’d been unconscious in a hospital bed and pale as a vampire, so anything is better than that in comparison. But still. Her stomach leaps at the sight of him living and breathing in front of her.

 

“Hi,” she replies. “Sorry to barge in like this, I just… I brought that ice cream you like.”

 

His eyebrows rise. “Thanks,” he says, reaching for it. “I can take it. Here, come on in.”

 

Clarke follows him inside and he leads her into his living room, and she can’t help but pause and look around to take it in. There are books everywhere, and old wooden furniture, and it’s all dark greens and browns and smells like coffee and is so _him_. Prior to this moment she only knew him at work and in Mount Weather, and she’s a bit overwhelmed by seeing him for the first time in his own space because it’s all very real. The kind of real they haven’t had to deal before now.

 

“You can take your coat off,” he says as he puts the ice cream in the freezer. “Do you want a drink?”

 

“Are you having anything?” she asks as she pulls off her coat and blazer.

 

“I was going to have a beer while I made dinner. I’m off the pain meds now, don’t worry. So there’s beer, or I’ve got some wine too, a red you might like,” he says. “Octavia left half the bottle when she was over the other night.”

 

She thinks of a wine tasting they’d done with some other couples back in Mount Weather and realizes that Bellamy knows what kind of wine she likes, like he knows a million other random things about her thanks to the undercover assignment.

 

“Wine would be nice, thanks,” she says. He pours her a glass and joins her back in the living room, gesturing for her to sit.

 

“So, how’ve you been?” he asks as he hands her the wine and sits at the other end of the couch. He has his guard up, she can tell, and she’s not sure how to proceed.

 

“I’ve been okay,” she says. “Busy. We wrapped up the case, I don’t know if Kane told you.”

 

“He did,” Bellamy replies. “Without my help, even though I tried.” He’s quiet for a moment, and then, “I thought you might give me an update about it. I guess you’re doing that now.”

 

She takes a breath and lets it go. “Bellamy, I’m sorry. That I didn’t come by or call you.”

 

He’s quiet for a moment, looking at his lap, and then back up at her, his eyes searching. “Why didn’t you?” he asks.

 

“I don’t know. After what went down in the factory I just… I had to get out of there,” she says, knowing it’s not a good enough excuse.

 

His eyes seem to burn into hers. “We were together non-stop for months, and shit goes down and you just leave?”

 

Her heart breaks at the hurt in his voice, and god, she is such an idiot.

 

“I thought you wouldn’t need me, once you had Octavia and Miller. I thought it was better if I just got out of your way,” she admits.

 

“Of course I needed you!” he says. “Clarke, you and I—I know we haven’t always gotten along, but that’s not how it is anymore. I trusted you, relied on you. We worked well together, and I’m not even talking about the sex. I thought we were friends.”

 

“You did?” she asks.

 

“I do. Don’t you?” he asks.

 

“Yes,” she says quietly.

 

“Then why have you been avoiding me?”

 

Her heart is in her throat, and her eyes sting. “I… when you got shot, Bellamy, it broke something in me. Seeing you bleed like that. I thought you were going to die.”

 

“But I didn’t,” he says softly.

 

“I know, but you could have. I was so scared.”

 

“So you left? Because I didn’t die?”

 

“I don’t—I left because you _can’t_ die,” she says, her voice breaking. “I couldn’t bear it if you died, and I couldn’t bear that I felt like that. I felt so many things I wasn’t supposed to feel,” she says.

 

His eyes focus more sharply. “What are you talking about?”

 

He’s really going to make her spell it out, isn’t he. “It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. We do work well together, and I _am_ talking about the sex, too. I thought I could keep sex and feelings separate, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it. Jokes on me.”

 

His eyes widen. She takes a sip of her wine for strength and sets it down on the coffee table and he just watches her, the gears in his head turning, and she wishes she could melt into the couch.

 

Then, in a swift motion, he comes across the couch and cups her cheek with his hand and kisses her, and she’s frozen in shock until his lips move against hers and she’s coaxed into the moment with him. She softens into the kiss, her breath releasing against his cheek as he tugs her bottom lip between his and he tastes like something she’s been missing for weeks. Like him.

 

The kiss ends and he moves back slowly, meeting her eyes. “You feel something?”

 

Her heart is a riot, and she nods.

 

“Thank god,” he breathes, and dives back in for another kiss, this time with an urgency that draws her in until she’s gathered into his arms.

 

“You do too?” she asks when they break apart again. “I thought it was just me.”

 

“You’re not the only one dealing with post-gunshot realizations, Clarke,” he says, his fingers running along her cheek as she settles against him as he looks at her in wonder. “I still can’t believe you ran in like that. You were the last thing I saw before I blacked out. When I woke up, once I got my bearings, you were the first thing I thought about.”

 

“Really?” she whispers, a warm feeling pooling in her stomach.

 

“Octavia told me she found you sleeping in my room when she got to the hospital, and I couldn’t stop thinking about seeing you again. I kept waiting for you to come back until I realized you weren’t going to.”

 

“I’m sorry,” she says, her heart aching again. She had no idea how much she’d hurt him. “I was just so scared. I never expected this. It caught me off guard. You were always so infuriating and then suddenly you weren’t anymore. Well, you were still infuriating, but in hindsight it’s because I was realizing I actually liked you and I was pissed about it.”

 

His lips curve as he chuckles, and she can’t resist running her thumb over one of his dimples, catching on his stubble. “I actually like you too,” he says.

 

“I’m glad,” she replies, hand skimming down to his chest. “Because the sex was really hot, and I’d be sad if we didn’t get to do more of that.”

 

His hand slides to her waist, and the feel of those fingers on her again sends sparks into her belly. “Oh really?”

 

“Actually, you said earlier you weren’t even talking about the sex, so maybe we should just work on this newfound friendship stuff,” she says slyly.

 

“I was hedging my bets,” he says, his thumb hooking under to the hem of her shirt. “And I know you don’t mean that. Because if there’s anything I learned undercover, it’s what you look like when you want to get laid.”

 

She shoves at him playfully and he laughs, and then they crash together again in another kiss, and this time it’s heated. She’s about to climb into his lap when she remembers that he was shot recently.

 

“Your injury,” she says, pausing where she is. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

 

“I can barely feel it anymore. Want to see it?” he asks.

 

“What, your scar? Actually, yeah.”

 

She moves back slightly and he tugs his shirt up, sliding the elastic of his waistband down until she can see the reddened mark where the bullet had gone in.

 

“It’s a lot better than it was,” he says. “The first week or so was brutal. Try to avoid getting shot in the abdomen if you can, healing is a bitch.”

 

She runs her fingers over it, a flash of the blood from that night running through her mind, and she’s hit again by a wave of relief that he’s okay. “I should have been here,” she says.

 

"You're here now," he replies.

 

"Yeah, but I should have been here sooner."

 

"I'm a lot more okay with you leaving now that I know it was because you figured out you actually liked me. And to think you were the one who made the rule about me not falling in love with you."

 

Her cheeks flame. "You broke it, too," she says.

 

“I guess I did,” he says with a smile that’s not fair, and then he grows serious. "Clarke, is this something you'd be interested in doing for real? With me? Not just sex."

 

"You mean like... be together?" she asks.

 

"Yeah," he says softly.

 

"I... After pretending to be married, and sleeping together, my whole sense of who we are to one another is all over the place,” she says quietly. “On the one hand I feel like I've been more intimate with you than I have with anyone, ever. But on the other hand, I feel like we barely know each other, at least not the real people we are when we're not pretending, or working, or being complete shits to each other for no good reason."

 

He pulls her closer into his arms. "This is who we are, Clarke. Right here. Figuring ourselves out, figuring each other out. We've got history, but this is a beginning, if you'll have it. If you'll have me."

 

Her heart swells. "Of course I'll have you," she whispers against his jaw before kissing him again. "This is not a normal dating situation, though. Just so we’re on the same page about that. People usually go on dates before they get married.”

 

"I don’t think there’s ever been anything normal about us,” he replies. “And I’ll take you on dates if you want them.”

 

She kisses the corner of his jaw and then moves to his neck, swinging her leg over his lap so she’s braced over him, not putting too much weight near his injury. “I do want them. I want you first though. It’s been too long.”

 

**

 

Bellamy had been waiting for Clarke to show up since she left, basically, but the days kept passing and he kept hearing nothing from her, and damned if he was going to be the one to get in touch with her. He’d almost died, and she couldn’t even bother with a text. He thought he’d felt everything on the anger spectrum toward her in their time knowing each other, but this was something new. He was angry, but more than that he missed her.

 

She’d become a part of his life in a way he’d never expected, working her way under his skin until she just made sense and he was left reeling. After he’d healed enough to be off morphine and start dealing, unmedicated, with the fact that she wasn’t coming back, he knew beyond a doubt that somewhere in the past few months he’d developed real feelings for her, in spite of his (and her) best intentions.

 

So when she actually shows up, he’s a hectic mix of mad and sad and more relieved than he wants to admit. And then they talk, and now she’s in his lap, and thank _god_ he’s mostly healed because he wants this, badly.

 

“It has been too long,” he says hoarsely as she kisses down the column of his throat.

 

“I’m so glad that mission is over,” she says into the crook of his neck, her fingers sliding against his chest.

 

“I’m assuming you didn’t mention the twelve days of non-stop sex in the final report,” he says, his hands gliding up her back beneath her silky shirt.

 

“I redacted that part,” she says. “And you were counting?”

 

“Of course I was counting. I was sleeping with my nemesis, that’s like the ultimate win.”

 

“You really think we were nemeses?” she asks.

 

“Who knows what we were by that point,” he replies. “Lines were pretty blurred. We were definitely complete shits to each other before, though, you were right about that.”

 

“You don’t think we’ll kill each other?” she asks.

 

“Going forward? We’ll probably try at some point, but I’m banking on you liking me too much to kill me even when I piss you off,” he says.

 

“Oh really,” she says, curving her hand down until she can feel his hardened cock through his sweatpants. “We’ll have to see about that.”

 

Her fingers move to the base of his cock through the fabric and his head drops back slightly. “Bedroom?” he asks.

 

“Yes,” she says, nodding and climbing off of him. He gets up and leads her to his room, and there’s something about having Clarke in his apartment for the first time that feels like a whole new chapter opening up for them. His place is much more modest than the spacious, modern condo in Mount Weather, but it’s his, and it’s been good to be in his own place again, even if he’s been confined and bored. And now that she’s here with him, it feels even more right.

 

She smiles shyly at him once they get to the bedroom, and he lets his gaze rake over her. She’s wearing her work clothes, and he realizes he’ll finally get the satisfaction of undoing professional Clarke, and he loves it. He closes the distance between them and kisses her, his hands reaching up to pull the elastic from her braid and work his fingers into her hair.

 

“You know, I’m starting to wonder if one of the reasons I fought you so hard over the years was that deep down I really wanted to be doing this,” he says as he loosens the braid, combing his fingers through until her hair lies wavy around her shoulders.

 

“I was definitely annoyed at you for being hot,” Clarke replies. “Like, as a general, underlying annoyance to make everything else about you that much more annoying. I’m kind of mad I didn’t think to take advantage of you sooner.”

 

"Benjamin and Catherine were useful for something," he jokes, and then he pulls her in for a kiss, tilting her head back so he can plunder her mouth. 

 

Her hands fist in the fabric of his t-shirt and he reaches to pulls her shirt upward until she lets go so he can lift it over her head. She's wearing a simple black bra and he runs his hands over her breasts and then down to the button on her pants. Her fingers glide beneath the waistband of his sweatpants and she pauses to touch his scar again. 

 

"I'll try to be gentle," she says.

 

He just growls into her hair as he nips at her neck and moves her pants down her hips. She grabs his ass and pulls his hips forward so he rubs against her stomach as she shoves his pants down, and they step back momentarily so they can both get out of their garments. 

 

She pulls his t-shirt over his head next and once they're both down to their underwear he leads her to the bed and lowers her to the covers. After she's lying back, he hovers over her and begins kissing his way down her body, her hips lifting so he can tug her panties over her legs. 

 

He kisses his way back up to her core and opens her gently, his thumb grazing her clit. Before he can get his mouth on her, though, she scratches his back lightly and pulls at his arm, causing him to look up.

 

"I want you inside me," she says, eyes wanton, and there's no way he can refuse that, so. He crawls up her body and shucks his boxer briefs as he goes. 

 

"I want to see your tits," he says, and her mouth curves as she arches her back to reach behind and undo the clasp. Her soft flesh spills free as the fabric loosens and she pulls the bra down her arms and tosses it aside. 

 

He loves playing with her breasts, working them until her nipples are taught and Clarke is mewling beneath him. She pushes them up with her hands and kneads with her own fingers as he suckles her and he is beyond happy she came over and they're back to this at last.

 

He slips one hand down to find her hot and wet, and when she feels him there she reaches until she can circle her fingers around his cock, guiding him forward. He enters her slowly, because over the last weeks he'd convinced himself that this probably wasn't going to happen again, and now that it is he wants to savor it. Also, while he's mostly healed, he's not yet back to where he was before he got shot, so even if he wanted to bang the shit out of her right now it probably wouldn't feel great around his injury.

 

Clarke arches her back again and moans his name, and together they set a pace that allows them to explore each other, reacquainting themselves with the way they connect.

 

"Fuck, I missed your cock," she says breathily as he adjusts his angle.

 

"Just my cock?" he replies as he rubs his thumb over her clit. He can feel her inner muscles react to the sensation as her eyes screw shut.

 

"And your hands," she pants. "And, just, you."

 

His heart swells and he leans down to capture her lips, and then her breasts. She begins urging him to move faster as her orgasm builds, her legs crossing behind his back to pull him deeper. He increases the pace and she meets his thrusts until she’s crying out his name and coming. The feel of her tightening around him pushes him over the edge until he sees stars, groaning as he lets himself go.

 

He lowers himself to the bed next to Clarke after slowly pulling out. “I missed you too,” he says.

 

She rolls onto her side and reaches for his hand. They held hands plenty of times as Benjamin and Catherine, but the twining of her fingers between his without any pretence feels completely new.

 

“Are you staying for dinner?” he asks, because now that he’s done having sex his body starting to remind him that he was getting ready to eat when Clarke arrived.

 

“What are you making?” she asks.

 

“Beef stirfry,” he replies.

 

“Oooo, I love that recipe.”

 

“I know you do, you stole all the broccoli every time I made it.”

 

“Then I’d love to stay and eat all the broccoli,” she says with a smile.

 

They get dressed enough to go to the kitchen, where Bellamy pulls together the ingredients and prepares the food. Clarke retrieves their drinks from the living room and then takes her time looking around his apartment, teasing him about his books. They have a minor debate about which Harry Potter book is the best, which they have to pause so they can sit down and eat. Clarke does steal all the broccoli, and he lets her.

 

It’s all very normal, the tempo they’ve come to have with one another sliding easily back into place, but this time it’s one hundred percent them.

 

He could get used to this.

 

_The End_

 


End file.
